Eighteen
by Garmonbozia
Summary: There was nothing especially awful or traumatic about James Moriarty's adolescence. There was, however, a time when things could have turned out differently. This is how that didn't happen.
1. Eighteen Days

A girl two parishes away went to England for an abortion, so every priest in every parish in every D postcode is preaching the Miracle of Life, this Sunday. Father Lawrence up there, he's taking his time about it, clocking twenty minutes so far and with no signs of slowing down. But I can tell you all about Miracle of Life in a few short, manageable sentences. The miracle of _my_ life, anyway.

I live on a street with a chapel at the top of it, and a chapel at the bottom of it. And it is not a long street. Twenty cramped terrace houses down either side, that does not make for a long street. Now, as a family, generally we find ourselves here, at the top of the street, with Father Lawrence. Because if Larry does twenty minutes you can beat that ould lad Bannon'll do forty. Ma's a Catholic, but there's a strict time limit on her tolerance. But the Church of the Veneration of the Sacred Virgin, down the hill, that has a Carmelite convent attached, and apparently that's makes it, like, a _deluxe_ chapel, so most of the locals go there. It's actually pretty bad form to come here for the quick mass. Maybe if people round here weren't sick to death of Ma already, she'd make the effort. Probably not. So here we sit (and stand, and kneel) Ma and four sisters and _me_ as-long-as-I-live-under-her-roof, at the quick mass, not feeling all that quick. Guaranteed; out of six, I am the only one thinking about the Miracle of Life.

The Miracle of Life, or my life anyway? The Miracle is I haven't fecking topped myself yet.

Well, it _used_ to be a miracle. These days I have an explanation for it. These days I can see the light at the end, getting closer every day. That's where my thoughts go when the Miracle of Life gets too depressing. But I want to get the details right, so I nudge Ma; "What date is it?"

"Shut up and listen," she hisses back at me.

What, about the Miracle of Life? _She's_ not listening. And if she _is,_ she's a hypocrite. I'm not pointing fingers or saying anything I shouldn't. I'm just saying there's less than a year between each of my sisters and then _nothing _after me. Forget it. She probably doesn't even know what date it is.

I need to look elsewhere. Father Lawrence is still doing twelve-to-the-dozen up there, so I've got time. This is my mission, my distraction. When I was five years old, sitting in this same grubby old chapel, which was new then, but still grubby, I used to look for patterns in the stained glass. The church hasn't changed, the boredom hasn't changed. The mission is the only thing that's changed.

Fat Joe's in the row behind, with his arse spreading out by the second, going to devour the whole church someday, but he's fat because he can afford to be. Sundays he'll sometimes where his big gold watch, and that has the date on it. All I need to do is drop something behind him and lean back for it. But it's an awkward angle and he doesn't always wear it. Then that's all chances blown, as soon as Ma figures out I'm not even pretending to pay attention anymore. No, the jelly-man can't help me, the jelly-man is of no use to anybody, fat bastard…

Should've picked up a leaflet on the way in. They have the date at the top of them. But I never lift one because then I have to pretend to read it, and Ma's very quick to notice if anybody's on the wrong page. Where's the nearest leaflet?

It's on the pew in front. Easier to get to, harder to cover up. It belongs to Margaret Day, too, sour-faced old bitch from two doors down. Got herself a d-i-v-o-r-c-e a couple of years ago and the nuns won't let her in the good chapel anymore. Don't think that doesn't sting her. I need to think about this one carefully, because if Mrs Day (as she is still referred to) starts sighing at me, I'll be finding my own meals the rest of this week.

A bit of research first, then; I lean forward over one knee. Just to 'tie my shoelace', but I swear to you, Ma and all the girls' heads turn as one, all staring, like I've done something that'll leave them mortified and hiding their faces until their Jesus comes for them. But what the hell, I'm down here now. Looking between the seat and the bar at the back of it, I can _almost_ see the date, just the edge of a red digit, but it's under Mrs Day's coat. I don't need to move it much. I just need Ma to look away. So I stay with the shoelace idea for five seconds too long until she shakes her head in disgust and looks back to Larry in his pulpit.

Then with one very quick hand (and, like, an _embarrassing_ feeling of accomplishment) I edge enough of the coat away. Thirtieth. The thirtieth and final day of April.

This is why it's no longer a miracle that I choose to go on. Better times are within reach, closer and closer, so close I can fucking taste it sometimes, like a beautiful scent that comes and goes when the breeze is right, all the better because it's not there all the time, it's going to be _amazing_. Without a doubt, like, _life-defining-moment_ incredible.

If you're counting down (and oh dear sweet bleeding Christ I am counting down), this is day eighteen. And those eighteen days will pass and I will _be_ eighteen. Normally I can take or leave birthdays. They're a day when you're a year closer to dying. But _eighteen_.

I swear to _God_, while I'm here in his so-called house under his all-seeing eyes, the final stroke of midnight, May 17th? It's a swift hard _slan_ to Dublin forever and ever, amen. These are the only prayers you'll ever catch me saying. Just let me make it that far, big lad, and that'll be you and me done. I'll go my way, you go yours. I know what you're thinking too, sir, that we went our separate ways a couple of years ago. There was something of a split between me and the straight-and-narrow, I'm the first one to admit that. And if it comes to the end and I was wrong and there's a hell, I'll stand up to that like a man. But just let me survive another eighteen days. Just give me that opportunity, let me tell Dublin to go and fuck itself, and we'll call it quits. Deal?

I feel like God nods and says 'Deal'. I'm in a church; if I feel like he agrees with me _here_, that's pretty good. It encourages me, too, to actually make sort-of an effort with the rest of the service. Actually, aside from the preaching, I don't really mind Mass. I mean, I think it's ridiculous, but the ritual of it, the normality. Yes, it's boring but… There's something about it. I can sit through one happy enough, except for the sermons. Anyway, it's only on the off-chance there actually is a big man in the sky paying attention to my every move. I feel like, if he can see me at least making a token effort, and what's eighteen days in the grand scheme of things? He just might… might be a little more inclined to help.

Reciprocity. I like that word. Never should have used it at school, though. Yeah, it was an English class, but that doesn't make it any better. You'd think I'd have learned that lesson by now. Fourteen years of being forced through social education, you'd think I'd have learned by now not to use words like 'reciprocity' in school. But it's, like, there's a point where the damage is done and I might as well say whatever I want… Nobody would think it was funny if they took a second and thought about it. Because it's _everything_, y'know. Reciprocity.

This whole life, this whole world, it's all about what you're getting out of it. Nobody wants to be around you unless you've got something to offer them. I'm going to live by that when I'm free. That'll be the only commandment. Thou shalt never be a waste of oxygen. Thou shalt never be fecking useless.

Anyway, Larry says the last of the amens and we all file out of the pew. Out through the entrance hall, under the wary, judgemental eyes of a dozen sculpted saints, until I get hauled back by the hood of my coat, Ma's pink plastic fingernails dragging down my neck _by accident_, saying, "What's the hurry?"

Which is _not_ fair, because I'm not hurrying. And Niamh and Caoimhe are in front of me, and they didn't get hauled back. They're talking and everything, and loudly too, about fixing Niamh's perm, which is hardly chapel-courtyard talk now, is it? But to Niamh and Caoimhe get their necks scraped open to bleed with the martyrs? Do the fuck…

Caoimhe, by the way, just while we're talking about my sisters, is a trainee hairdresser. But she's been a trainee hairdresser for three years, so I'm thinking she's probably shite at it or she'd be a hairdresser by now and no trainee about it. That's why Niamh's perm is crap; she looks like Bruce Springsteen. I'm not being petty or bitter or anything, I'm just telling you facts about my sisters.

Here's two facts about the other two; Mena, who is the eldest, exits the chapel with her arm wound through Ma's. This is not a sweet, affectionate gesture. This is because she knows she'll be the one stuck with the bat in her old age. She's practicing for that. And, y'know, working her way to the top of the will, but that probably comes across as cynical, doesn't it? And the two of them, Mena and Ma, they have Cathy so cowed she doesn't dare walk a half-step away from them. Ma pulling me back, I'm practically standing on Cathy's toes and she hasn't even the wit to move. It's not her fault, exactly?, but it sickens me looking at her all the same.

Thou shalt never be weak. If I was going to have a second commandment that would be it, but I like to think that one is just a given. After all, what could be more useless than having your entire life dictated by somebody else? Eighteen days and then nobody'll ever be able to dictate to me again.

I reach back and, careful as I can, extract my hood out of those talons. I explain, softly, carefully, "I'm going down to Sacred Virgin, wait for Conor coming out." It's okay to be careful of her, now that we're so close to the end. A month or two ago, it would have made me physically _ill_, explaining myself to Ma. But at this point, what difference does it make? It's nice to be nice, when it won't be for long.

"Dinner at two," is all the thanks I get for my efforts.

"I'm having dinner at Conor's house."

From Ma's shoulder, with a snide little nose-twitch she does like I smell or something, Mena says, "Why?"

Because Conor's ma can actually cook. Because his Da's funny (and he's _got_ one of those). Because Conor's got a brother, Noel, and even though I don't really like him I've always wondered what that would be like. Because the Clearys don't make me sit on the spare chair, which is actually from the desk upstairs and is two inches shorter than the rest of the dining room chairs. Loads of reasons, really. And I would tell everything single one of them to Mena, and top it all off by telling her I would actually be able to keep food down at the Clearys house, because I wouldn't have to look at _her_ while I was eating. But I can't really say any of that in front of Ma. I shrug and tell her, "Because he asked me?"

Ma actually tells me, in as many words, to 'Be Good'. _Ugh... _You see, by now, why I have to get out of here? I hope so anyway; I don't like having to spell things out.

Anyway, I leave them all there. There's at least half-an-hour of socializing to do after Mass, like these people don't all live within spitting distance of each other. I'm not up for it. Anyway, that all goes a lot smoother without me around. So I leave them to it and walk down the hill to the other chapel. Like I told you, their priest goes on a bit longer. He likes to give it the full fire-and-brimstone. One of his sermons might actually get quite interesting. But he won't have our 'heathen clan' (direct quote, that) in Sacred Virgin, so I'll never know.

I wait inside, in the hall. An almost identical hall to the one us heathens have up at St Michael's, but we'll not tell Father Brennan that. Same saints and everything, except these ones are paintings and not statues. You know them by their methods of execution; St Lucy, holding a plate with her two torn-out eyes lying bloody on it. St Sebastian, tied to a pillar and shot full of arrows. St Peter, crucified feet first. There's one, I forget her name because she's not on these walls, but you know her in a painting because they draw her with her own flayed-off skin flung over her arm like a fecking fox fur or something… They fuck you up, your Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

That's quite clever, actually, I'm quite proud of that one. Don't get me wrong; I never understood all this business well enough that I can blame anything on it. I don't think anybody should try and explain what's wrong with me. But I just feel like I should feel _more_ about Lucy and her lonely looking eyeballs.

'More of _what_' is what I'm trying to figure out, standing looking at the painting, at mournful Lucy in a dusty pink robe, and they're just wrapping up inside, when the main doors open. There's that little burst of noise before they seal again, that rumble of loads of people answering at once. I turn towards it. It's Holy Joe. He's Fat Joe's brother-in-law (this whole area being one biggish pond of borderline incest), but thin as a rake, so nobody gets them confused. He's lay-clergy, and comes out still wearing his cheap, not-even-gold-plated medal round his neck from giving out communion. The other thing he's wearing is a very strong and not very Christian hatred burning out from inside him. Before he even speaks I fix my face to 'really-do-not-care', just so we'll all know where we stand.

He says, "Out."

Says me, pointing up at the ceiling, "House of God. You speak for God, do you? God throwing me out of his house? If God tells me to get out, I'll go. His house, after all." This might sound like I'm deliberately poking at him? That's because I am. I'm not thick; this ends with me leaving. So I might as well piss him off while I'm still here.

"We can do without little psychos like you around here. If Father Lawrence'll have you up the road, I'd suggest you-"

"I've just come from them. It wasn't enough. I wanted more. I wanted to feel the spirit flowing through me. And tell me Father Brennan goes that way, so-"

"_Out_!" he says, a bit sharper this time.

So I go out. Wait in the thin, cold rain. Because the proper god-botherers don't want me. Honestly… you come back from _one_ major world city with _one_ totally-not-proven scare story behind you and suddenly you're the Antichrist. But that's a whole other story. Not supposed to talk about that. Not-while-I-live-under-her-roof. I didn't even do it. I swear. Scout's honour. Cross my heart and kiss a pig, I didn't even do it. Whatever you've heard about me, I didn't even do it.

Anyway, Conor's first out of the church. And he is hurry, but nobody drags him back and nobody's calling after him. He just keeps walking and I fall in beside him, getting _away_ from there. He says, "Did that chapter-and-verse arsehole lay into you again?"

"Fuck him."

"We should do something to him before we leave." I wish he meant that. Conor likes to talk about that kind of thing, and he comes up with some evil fecking ideas, but he'd never do anything about it. And he wouldn't like if anything got done about it either. I don't hold it against him. If it was something really important, he wouldn't be all talk anymore.

But Conor came out of that church, all clean-cut and blonde hair and looking like the altar boy he used to be. He's not going to move against Holy Joe. It's a good idea, but he wants to leave his options open. Conor wants to be able to visit. Which, to me, just sounds like mental illness, but what can I do? He's my mate; you have to put up with these things.

"Jesus," he mutters, turning his collar up. "There's countries where it's summer already. We're going to one of those."

By definition, a country where it's summer already won't be Ireland, so I just say, "Okay. Is your Noel getting us into the pub?"

"Noel doesn't need to get us into the pub," he says, dead proud of himself. Conor's two weeks older than me and acts like it makes all the difference. I've been suffering this routine for a fortnight.

"Well, is Noel getting _me_ into the pub, then?"

"Noel doesn't _need_ to get you into the pub, James."

"Well then, are _you_ getting me into the pub? Is that what you're getting at? _Oh great and benevolent Conor_, is that what you're looking for?"

Fast, admitting he's taking the piss, "I would if I could, but everybody knows you round here so we're still fucked."

"So we're going to the shed, then."

Conor nods, "We're going to the shed. Not be long now, we can drink wherever we want."

"Eighteen days," I tell him, glad to finally tell somebody. "Eighteen days and it's elbow to elbow at any bar in the country."

"Trust you to put a fecking number on it."

"Now, you can get to eighteen. We got you counting to twenty before, remember? When you had to use your toes as well as your fingers?" He shoves me off the kerb, nearly in front of a red Fiesta that swerves, but doesn't blow the horn on a Sunday morning. Only a half second too late, Conor grabs me back, laughing, and when I get over nearly dying with eighteen days to go, I laugh too. And we walk on towards the shed, the two of us, to burn this day. Then the other days will follow. Then we'll be gone.

The miracle will be _life_, finally.


	2. Seventeen Days

Day seventeen, Conor leaves me to skive school alone, the prick. He's got a hurley game after lunch, though. He said to stick around and he'd try and get me out of the afternoon classes as a spectator. I tried. Honest I did. Got all the way through maths too, but I don't mind maths. Got as far as morning break and then was standing there, queued for the vending machine, and realized there was nothing nice left in it anyway, and there's a shop too close by not to be tempting and the shop would have Opal Fruits and the only thing waiting for me beyond the vending machine trauma was double chemistry and I just couldn't face it. Found Conor, told him not to wait for me, slipped out down the back of the playing fields.

It's cold and raining and a shite day to skive off, but I just couldn't face it. It's dull. It's so dull. It's not even the lessons that bore me to tears. Alright, so every time they start into a new topic with whatever scrap of enthusiasm a teacher can ever have been left with, I already know what's coming. But that's not a problem. When you listen to people talking about facts, you get a different perspective, and you learn more that way. And if, like me, you've already got some knowledge, then you know the right questions to ask to get past the pass-your-exams version and hit at something true. The lessons themselves, I like.

It's the other faces. Being surrounded by other lads who are either laughing at something else and not even listening or who are just stupidly, blankly staring. I just don't understand it. And teachers look at that like _that's_ normal. They're not allowed to say it, but in their eyes, you see it, they agree with the rest of the class when it comes to me. That's what I get bored of. Being the only clear head in the room, that is murder.

Sometimes it occurs to me they're maybe right and I'm the one who's fucked up. I get the feeling I could be talking to all the wrong people and maybe I need to meet somebody who knows about this kind of cut-off sensation I get? And then I'll get something pelted at the back of my head and hear the laughter, and when I breathe deep to ignore it I see in my head Saint Lucy, holding out her eyes on a silver platter. If it was good enough for a saint, I'll say to myself. And people like that, what could be wrong with cutting the eyes out of their heads and making them wander around, holding them out on silver platters? Think of people like that and think about that image and tell me I'm wrong.

If you're telling me I'm wrong, you're one of them. But it's alright. Soon I'll be away from here. More than that, I'll be able to go wherever I want. And if I have to trek all over this world like some fecking monk or something, I swear before Christ and the Host I'll find a place where people like you are in the minority, finally. It won't be easy, but I'll get there.

There's an old record in the jukebox at the pub, always gets played at wakes. _This is my quest, to follow that star… _No matter how hopeless…

Fuck it. I need to stop thinking about this shite, it's depressing me. Think about seventeen. Seventeen's a great number. Underrated. You don't hear enough about seventeen. It just sort of lingers between fifteen and twenty, being odd, stuck in the middle. But seventeen is stalwart. Seventeen does its job, straight and true, and it'll never see you stuck at eighteen on your way down to sixteen. Seventeen's a gent.

The _best_ thing about seventeen is it's less than eighteen. Time is definitely passing. We're definitely getting there.

I think I'll go shooting. Get the air rifle out of the shed, get a few shots at the birds in the park. I got a squirrel once. Let it go. I took its tail, like, because I'd earned that, but I let it go. That tail is still nailed to the door when I get to the shed. Been there a couple of years now, looking a bit ratty. But it's still there, and it's still mine. Little fucker never came back for it anyway.

Actually, all of this reminds me, this place is sort of a problem. As far as me and Conor leaving our affairs in order, I mean. Because we kind-of inherited it off Noel and Noel's mate Tommy, and _they_ inherited it off Tommy's elder brother, and so on and so forth back to Raquel Welch and the dinosaurs. But neither of us has anybody to pass it on to. We'll just have to _pick_ somebody. It's not a great honour or anything. It's a lean-to shack at the forgotten back wall of the park. There's a tree growing across the door, so you can't be fat and get in. The ivy is creeping in around the window, but you can't complain about that, because we're pretty sure the ivy is the only thing holding the place together. It's just a stash, for the air rifle, for can of lager nicked when everybody else was too pissed to notice, for fegs or anything else you can lay hands on. For a jumper to cover up school uniform on the beak. But if nobody comes here anymore, it'll just crumble. I don't want it to.

But there'll be a time, and we'll talk that out. Conor probably knows somebody. I don't really care who so long as there's somebody.

Anyway, I arm myself and fill a pocket with spare pellets and, in my jumper camouflage, I take off across the park, real stealthy like, sticking to the wall, into the sick, patchy tree cover at the far side. That's where I got my squirrel. I want another one. I got my first squirrel when me and Conor were just starting to plan for this. I want one now, like bookends.

"We could go up north," he said. "Just to get started. I have an uncle in Donaghadee." Which is the arsehole of nowhere, but we were sixteen and it wasn't the arsehole of Dublin we already lived in. It sounded all exotic to us. Conor's uncle is still the plan, but only until my house get the idea I'm not coming back. Which is just long enough to be residents, too. And then we get passports and then we're away. America before Christmas, that's the plan. One way or another, plane, train or automobile, even if I have to talk Conor into selling his arse to pay for it (and I _so_ could, I know I could), America before Christmas.

He talks a lot about America. Me, I think my feelings are clear that 'away' is the only goal. But he'd make you sick, so he would. You should hear the way he goes on about it. Streets-pave-with-gold shite. Real cliché, like. All he's missing is the ginger hair and a pot of gold sometimes.

I'm taking careful aim at something with black and grey feathers (I don't know names; it just looked like the right thing to shoot) when I hear it. Tiny, tiny little noise, but it's there. That tickling sound, tiny paws and tiny claws on tree bark. It's behind me. I turn just in time to watch my next squirrel disappear into the upper branches. I pace around at the bottom, looking for him, looking for movement. "C'mon, y'little fecker… Swear to God, I only want your tail."

This must be his home tree. It's being too good, hiding him entirely, or he's gone up too high for me. That's alright. I've got all day. I know how to wait when I'm after something. Hand-outs or hand-me-downs, I've been given nothing in this life. I know how to wait when I'm working for it. I park up in the scrub not too far away. It's warmer and sheltered from the rain and I can keep a close eye. It feels good, feels like nature. Me and my quarry. I can wait longer than him. He ran past me, but he's a brute creature, probably doesn't even know how great a threat I pose. I keep the rifle with me, propped up, ready, easy to grab, and relax into it.

There's a real world somewhere and this is forest as old as what it's standing on, and I've got a real weapon and he's not a squirrel but some incredible beast that wants to eat me alive. I want to go there some day. I'd be able to hear his breathing, feel him gathering his strength to launch an attack on me and the firearm that terrifies him so because he doesn't understand it.

I don't know how long I wait. I know it startles me when the leaves rustle against the wind and I know it's him. The control of me, getting up, readying the rifle, I realize exactly how important this is to me. I want to take his tail with me when I go. That probably means something, but here, in this second, it doesn't matter, not a bit, not for a heartbeat.

It's incredible. I'm so _aware_ I actually see even his little nose poke out of the leaves. Then he disappears back in for a minute, like he left the oven on, and then the little nose again.

And then, "_Help!_" A woman, screaming, "Help!" My most worthy adversary flees back into those upper reaches again and I spin swearing towards the noise because how fucking dare she, this bitch, whoever she is, what's so bloody important?! She's still screaming, "Help! Stop that fecking prick!"

I can't see her, but I see the fecking prick. A junkie, clearly, looking like his own skeleton, running like the hungry, heavy breathing squirrel monster was snapping at his arse, with a handbag under his arm.

I got stopped, I lost my fecking squirrel, over a snatched handbag?

Raise the rifle. Watch his steps. Take aim. Time it. _Crack_ and I get him right in the ankle. He flips forward on it, ninety degrees out of the air, flat on his face. And he doesn't get up. Drops the handbag and rolls around clutching his foot. His expression is odd. Pain, yes, obviously there's pain in it. But there's something else. I don't get it. I walk up, get closer.

_Trying_ to get a good look at him, trying to look past what's written all over him and see that other thing. Like, I beat him, defeated him; I want to understand what makes up that defeat. You probably don't know what this feeling is like, unless you've ever been there. Maybe people get it from sports. I never could figure out the attraction with sports, it's all so arbitrary, but if you get this feeling out of it then yeah, I see it. Powerful. He's rolling around in the muck because I'm a good shot. Tears in his eyes, big round actual _tears_. What is it that makes the look on his face so frigging good, that brings up this feeling in me?

And then I get it. I've seen it before. It's in the wide, roving eyes, the noises than aren't words, the thick, wet lips. He's thick. Probably high. But no, I mean, he's just completely fucking thick as shite. _ He doesn't understand what just happened_. It's so amazing because he doesn't know what I did to him or even that it was me.

Everything else I've ever wanted, I've never wanted anything the way I want this feeling to be forever.

He stretches out for the handbag. I knock it away from him with the butt of the rifle.

And then, finally, the screamer comes running after him. Well, waddling. If we were depending on her to catch up with him, we'd be hoping her system would start burning fat while his system ran out of dope to work through. She heaves herself up the hill step by thundering step, concentrating so hard on it, on just breathing, that she doesn't look up until she practically trips over him.

Mutters through her rasping, "The feck?" She leans forward, braced on her knees. Looking at him. And the fecking prick (her words, remember, not mine) can't move. I'm scared of what might happen if she tried to pick something off the ground, so I lean down, pick up her handbag and hold it out to her.

She grabs it off me. Like it must burst into flames if it stays in my hand. Snatches it. "The frigging hell did you do?" she pants. "What're you doing with that thing?" 'That thing', by the way, being my trusty gun. It's very offended, y'know, I can feel it off it in waves… "I ought to get coppers," she says.

So I turn my back. I am walking away. I'm good at walking away.

"Fucking little loon!" she shouts at my back. I know I'm should be _really_ hurt because she must really hate me, if she can find enough breath to shout. "I know your Mena. They'll all be hearing about this!"

Christ's sake… What chance have you, in this life? Can't do right for doing wrong…


	3. Sixteen Days

"It's a dead cert," Conor is saying. "There is no surer thing than this." This is him trying to talk me into copping off with Maria Jameson before we go.

This is me saying, "No," for about the fifth time.

The great debater has run out of arguments and gets frustrated. "Why not?"

"Because the only dead cert is the crab lice…" Someday, the bus stop outside our school will collapse, weakened from repeatedly having Maria Jameson's back shoved against it. When they erect a new one (no fecking pun intended), they'll put up a plaque in her name. Dead cert, yeah, nothing wrong with my chances. It's just _walking_ I might have some trouble with, when all's said and done.

"That was only a rumour."

"Oh, and you know that for a fact, do y-?" But when I look round at him he's grinning all over his face, hitching his jeans by the belt buckle. Yeah, yeah, yeah; he's playing the stud when he's just told me in so many words she's a sure thing. "Well, that settles it. I'm not going _anywhere_ you've been."

"Aw, c'mon!"

"Why are you so obsessed with this, please?"

"I'm not. Maria asked Kate to ask Johnny to ask me if I'd ask you, that's all it is." Now, once I get over untangling that one – it goes; Maria, Maria's mate, Maria's mate's boyfriend, who is on the gaelic team with Conor. It just takes me a second remembering all the various relationships – it leaves me with one really clear question. In that why, not three, four weeks before school ends forever, has Maria Jameson suddenly looked in _my_ direction and thought, 'Yes please'. I could ask Conor. Conor would ask his mate who would ask his girlfriend who would ask Maria. I would get an answer somewhere around the year 2002. Anyway, I'm not sure I want to know.

I do have one theory. Having paid careful attention all these years, it strikes me as not too unlikely that Maria has _at the very least _snogged every other fella in the year. I may well just be the last of a large collection. It's like a stamp collector, who's got his Penny Black and his Hong Kong whatever, and suddenly realizes he doesn't have a normal first class stamp for the post. No. Fuck it. Let her suffer from this incompleteness. I've got nothing against Maria. I can have a conversation with her. But this has been _her_ oversight and _she_ can live with it.

Anyway, Conor's still insisting this means nothing to him, he's just the messenger. "Right," I say, "so you couldn't give a toss if I say, one more time here, oh my dear Jesus No?"

He shrugs, makes out it's exactly as I say. "Couldn't give a toss."

"Right. All talked over then."

"Only… Y'know the way we're going to Mark's right now?"

Oh. We're not the only one's going to Mark's. Right… I can see it all now, the night stretched ahead of me. First assumptions, then uncertainty, then whispering in corners, then recriminations, then I spend my last twelve school days suddenly labelled 'queer' and everybody saying they always knew that anyway. Conor tries to set me up roughly once a month, chiefly to keep that sudden _revelation_ at bay, to stop the scales suddenly leaping up to everybody's eyes. That'll stop when we get away. People don't talk about you if they don't know you. But tonight, they'll talk. And while, like I said before, they can't hurt me in any way, can't do me any damage here at the end, I just can't be bothered. I don't really know what I'd do if somebody started taking the piss now.

This is because of leaving. I don't know if it's an upside or a downside. It's knowing that any punishment or recrimination will have to be temporary. It takes away the consequences. And when there are no consequences, why wouldn't you just _do_ a thing?

But for tonight, for tonight… I turn around. Conor goes on a step or two before he realizes. Then he comes to get me again, grabbing me back by the arm. "No, don't. I never said you would, I only said I'd ask."

"Well, you can _say_ I felt like shite and went home."

"Jim, fuck's sake, come _on_."

"I can't be arsed with Mark anyway. I'll see you tomorrow." He calls after me again, but I just wave to him and keep going.

It's not really Mark I have the problem with, or Maria Jameson really. I just hate any night that starts with a vision of exactly how the night's going to go. It bleeds all the fecking fun right out of it. Does that make any sense? I get bored before I even start. And you can't change it, y'know. You might say that, if you're an optimistic, if-your-happy-and-you-know-it sort of prick like that, you might say I could take that nightmare and turn that frown upside-fucking-down and all that shite. You might. If you were a daft sort of twat like that, you might.

Thing you might say like that are based on the assumption that I'm in control of everything. But I don't make any difference. I'm only _in_ this world. Other people make it up. And it's other people I can see when I look ahead down this night, and what other people will do, and how that will impact me.

Conor swears at my back just before I turn the corner. He doesn't get it. It's alright. I'll see him in the morning. Even if he's still pissed off I'll remind him how close we are to the great escape. There's no point getting annoyed about stupid local things like this. But I'm not going there.

The worst of it is, Noel gave us a lift down into town and now I've got no lift back. Hoofing it. It's alright.

I say that all the time, don't I? 'It's alright'. It's alright it's alright it's alright it's alright. I say that a lot and I don't always like it. It's alright, though. Hoofing it from town, that's alright. Town's alright. Town's a bit more honest than where I live. Out in the far reaches, that little parish clinging on to Dublin's edge like soap scum, everything happens behind closed doors. It doesn't mean nobody knows about it, though. On the contrary; by some process I haven't been able to figure out yet, _everybody_ knows _everything_. And yet nobody mentions it, and when you talk about it it's only behind your own closed door.

But in _town_, it's different. I pass the end of an alley and there's a fella just taking a shite right there in the street. It's an extreme example, but you get my meaning. Town's just a bit more open about things. There's a message in it. I don't exactly have the words for it.

Ha – 'shit happens', maybe?

Nobody's expecting me at home yet. They'll not even think about it. So where I should keep going straight, I turn left. Not going anywhere in particular. I don't really know this part of town. But I'm hanging around here a while.

I'm not looking for anything or even watching. I just wander across it all. There's freaks scoring off a dealer outside a chicken restaurant. There's some hopeless sod in his best business suit crawling out of a pawnshop without a scrap of jewellery or even his briefcase. I cross the street because there's a whore leaning out of a doorway in skintight PVC. This is all inside ten minutes. I don't even need to be looking. Don't get me wrong, I'm not telling you this is the sort of world I want to live in. But at least it's at peace with itself. It's damned and it's sordid and it's disgusting, but it knows that.

This is the closest I ever get to the city-proper. Maybe I'm missing something.

Then there's one thing I stop to watch, because I'm not the only one stopped to watch it. There's a drunk man standing on the pavement by the river. Standing opposite him, reared up with its neck stretched to be the same size as him, is a swan. Swans are vicious bastards. I have a scar on the back of my ankle where a swan nearly hamstrung me once. I was eight. I fucking hate swans. I am about the one person in the gathering crowd cheering for the wino.

The swan, the way they do when they're threatened and the kind of thing eight-year-olds should be taught, has spread its wings and is hissing and honking. 'Honking' is the only way I can describe the weird, throaty noise they make. But the other fella has stuck his arms out and is giving just as good back. I don't think the swan knows quite what to make of his imitation. They just stand bellowing at each other, and we who watch either laugh or are silent.

It just goes on and on. Honestly. Real full minutes this goes on. The auld lad might actually have a chance here, I'm thinking, _hoping_. I want to see that swan get its fecking neck broke.

Eighteen is exciting, seventeen's a straight-talker and sixteen? Sixteen is sweet. Let's see a swan get its neck tied in a sailor's knot.

And then some wanker throws a stone at the bird. It's struck, and staggers forward out of its defence position. It's only collapsing, but it staggers at the auld drunk, who turns tail and bolts, bricking it. And everybody laughs and I think, _Fuck's sake…_

The swan takes off back to the river. As people disperse, I follow it as far as the railings and watch it disappear downriver, where the river gets wide and there's a real city on either side, quays and bridges and then the sea. Fluffy white prick. I watch until somebody taps me on the right shoulder. I turn and there's nobody there. But there's somebody laughing on my left so I turn the other way.

Conor.

"The fuck are you doing here?"

He shrugs. "Got bored. The fuck are you doing _here_?"

"Homeless fella," I tell him. "Took on a swan. You just missed it."

"Who won?"

"Nobody. They shook hands on it. There's a rematch next week. Don't worry, I got you a ticket." Conor lifts up the plastic bag he's carrying, reaches in and pulls a can of lager off the tabs. We were bringing a six pack along. This is the first one, so he never made it as far as Mark's. He's been looking. Now that I'm found, he hands this to me. "Thanks." He pulls one off for himself and until they're started we stand by the railing. But you get cops rolling along here at night sometimes, so pretty soon after that we start walking again. "You didn't have to come back for me."

"Fuck it. I don't want to look at them all either. So was it, like, an actual full-size swan, like?"

"Yeah."

"Like the one that-?"

"Yeah, like the one that bit me. By the way, if anybody ever asks where I got the scar-

"Swan won't be mentioned, mate, no worries."

"But yeah. Yeah, like a big real swan-type swan. It wasn't one of those blue polka-dot squirrel type swans you see on the news."

"Piss off."

After a while exploring we find a quiet spot to stop and finish the first cans. After this we'll move on again. But five minutes break is alright. Nobody's coming for us either. We're up a back street and through a broken window. This place has been empty a while too. You can tell by the way the graffiti is bubbling off the walls, flecks of it dripping to the floor.

At first, it's just Conor telling me about Big Lad off the hurley team and how many Jaffa Cakes he was able to get into his face after the match yesterday, puffing his face up like a hamster, doing the noises. It makes me laugh. But then that conversation runs out, and he thinks of something else to talk about. "Here, did you shoot a jogger with the air rifle?"

Ah. See, he's a jogger now. So that there can be _no_ doubt that I'm the one in the wrong. I tell Conor, "It was an accident. I was aiming at a squirrel."

"That's my brother's. If that eejit-park keeper finds it in the shed and takes it away you're paying for it." If that eejit park keeper takes it away I'll put a clown mask on and terrorize him in his bed to steal it back. But I don't tell Conor that. I probably won't do that, anyway. He probably won't take it. Conor opens his mouth to issue some other warning about what Noel'll do to me if I get the air rifle confiscated. Then closes it again. "Do you hear that?"

I nod and go to the window. Talking. But not normal talking. The kind that makes you say 'Did you hear that?' and creep around in silence looking for the source. Low voices, nasty words. And then, over the top, a voice almost crying, "I never fucking did it!" Not a local voice. Somebody from the North, I think. "I never fucking did anything," he says for emphasis, and a local voice comes booming over the top of him, "We know you did!"

I'm in the window frame. It's too dark here, there's no way they can see me. Conor is still trying to pull me back out of the way. But I see the first punch land and shove him away.

It's incredible; the guy, whoever he is, whatever he's done, that fist goes up under his ribs and he crumples around it, up off his feet and then down against the wall. There are two of them set to beat him. The one doing the battering now goes on for a minute or so, then stops. He kneels down and grabs the outsider away from the wall, both arms wrapped around to keep his head still. He braces the guy, who isn't struggling, who is like a wet towel, limp and completely passive.

But then the other one, who has only stood there so far, brings out something which catches what little light there is, flashing. A knife. He kneels down and the outsider remembers how to struggle. Every part of him that can move is fighting. None of it's doing him any good.

Everybody but the man with the knife has their back to me, but I hear the noise he makes, and I see from the glint of the blade that he gets his face cut along the jawline and his nostrils slit in two little flicks. You'd think this would all be about marking him, about making some kind of traitor live every day with his scars. If that was the case, this would be a good idea and really well done.

But then he pulls the knife back and just puts it in his ribs a couple of times. And the man with the knife and the man who did the beating stand up, and they walk away.

The first I remember Conor's even here is when I hear him shaking next to me, breathing out, "Jesus Christ_…"_

Stupid thing to say. Jesus Christ obviously didn't come into this.

As soon as they're gone I climb back out through the window. Conor's behind me, wanting to know what I'm doing, why I'm going towards the stabbed man rather than away. I wish he'd shut his mouth. I get there and kneel down by him. He's still breathing. The ragged edge on either side of his nose sort of… _flutters_. He's wheezing bubbles of blood. And Conor is shocked he's alive and saying we should get an ambulance, but that's not going to do anybody here any good. Fella's on his way out, and fast. He knows this.

He doesn't know who I am when I look him in the eye.

I don't know who those two heavies were or what this fella did to them. But the look on his face… The feeling, even by proxy… He's just looking back at me. Probably not thinking straight, when he's dying, but looking at me. Maybe somewhere deep he knows I watched, knows I could have shouted, could have done something. I don't think there's enough of him left to wonder why I didn't.

I watch him go out like a fire, slowly.


	4. Fifteen Days

Conor's not doing very well. Him and me both snuck in and stayed at Noel's last night and he never slept. He lay on the sofa all night and stared at the ceiling. Kept saying, not to me or anyone in particular, "He _died_." And I know this because I sat in the armchair all night and stared out the window. Kept saying, "I know."

'A rough area'. When Noel first moved out from down the street, Ma and Mena were sitting in the kitchen, and Cathy was doing dishes, and they all said, 'A rough area'. Not like our nice, quiet street where nothing ever happens. They were just jealous, though. It doesn't look so rough to me. In the early hours, when Conor rolls over to hide his face and cry, I get up and go to the window. The light comes up in a warm brick red, edging out the distant city centre into black first. Then the sun gets higher and the light spreads, street by street, turning the river bright, showing up three or four dark swans sailing up together. Everything that catches the light is decaying, ragged edges off buildings they haven't knocked down yet, fence bars bent out of place so the fence isn't a barrier, puddles of rain and litter and vomit in the gutters. But it doesn't look all that rough to me, really.

He died. His lights went out while I was looking into them, and he knew I was looking. It was a really deep experience. I feel like some part of him belongs to me now, even if the rest is gone. Does that make any sense?

Things that happened in London were like this. London looked like this, actually, in the mornings. I had my own bedroom there, but it was bare and strange and I could never sleep in it. All I really remember is that the bed sheets were blue and I always saw dawn. It looked a lot like this. Maybe it's like this; a city centre is a stone in a pond, and all the neighbourhoods that spread out from it are like ripples, and in every big city you could find yourself standing in just the same ripple and seeing exactly the same thing. Maybe they're all the same and nothing changes but the accents.

Oh Christ, I hope not.

I was never sorry when I got sent back from London, return-to-sender, like the wrong parcel. It wasn't until it was far too late that I realized my chances were so much better there.

But that's a stupid fucking thing to be thinking about. No point in thinking about that. Too close to the end to worry about the lost chances from before. It doesn't help anybody and it doesn't make me feel anything good, so I put that away. Put it away and get to thinking about here and now.

Noel must have stayed with his girlfriend last night. He's not back yet. We don't have to deal with him. Conor is in no fit state to deal with him, if he comes in now. He'll tell everything that happened and then we're completely fucked, the both of us. We've probably got another couple of hours before Noel comes back to get ready for work. Still, I should probably start working _now_. So I go over to the sofa and, just gentle like, just with the backs of my fingers, I push his shoulder. "Conor," I say. "Conor, wake up." I say it like I think he's really sleeping. He wouldn't want anybody to know he's cried. "Conor, c'mon. We should, like, talk about this."

"Oh right," he says, suddenly not even pretending to be asleep, just sitting straight up, "Right, so _now_ it's okay to talk, we've decided we can talk now, is that it?" This is all because I wouldn't talk about it last night. That wasn't my fault. There would have been no point in talking about it. He was in shock or whatever he was in, and in a panic, and he wasn't talking sense about anything anyway, so I stopped talking back until he shut up. That was the only sensible thing for me to do. But he's awake now, bloodshot eyes and all, and he's right back into it. This time more angry than panicked, "I saw your fucking face last night. You _loved_ it. He died and you _loved_ it!"

"Keep your voice down."

"You're a psycho."

"You need to chill the fuck out." I leave him sitting there and go through to the kitchen. "Noel's not home yet. Do you want breakfast?"

"Y'know, I stuck with you when you came back from London and everybody said you'd-"

"Well, I'm having breakfast anyway."

"-killed that other lad over there, because it just sounded so fecking stupid, but honestly? Now? _Honestly_? Who's looking fecking stupid now?"

"Conor, your brother's got no food in his flat, the bastard. C'mon. We'll go and get something tepid and greasy. Somewhere has to be open already." He stares at me for a while. Then the gaze goes away, like he's wondering if he even said all that out loud. Then he puts his shoes on and comes with me. "What happened last night," I tell him, as we make our way down the stairs and away, "was between those people at the end of the alley. There was nothing we could have done."

"We watched them _kill_ him." I wish to Christ he'd keep his voice down. We're all very aware of the facts. Even if I'd managed to miss it somehow, he's told me a couple of dozen times through the night.

"Yeah, but they were going to do that anyway. The only difference would have been whether they done us in too. Do you get it?" He doesn't want to listen to me. But I'm talking sense and part of him gets that. "Wait and see; you'll never even hear about it again. Just forget it. Everybody else alive is going to forget it, so just forget it. We'll just go and have breakfast and forget it."

Conor, who you'll remember hauled me up for going quiet on him last night, stops talking after that. But at least he doesn't look angry anymore. Eating seems to be the ticket too, seems to help him. Then, just as he finishes mopping brown sauce off the plate with his toast and scrapes the last crumb up, he bolts for the toilets at the back of the caf and comes back pale and shaky again. I try not to get annoyed at him. I mean, for my money, he's overreacting to this, in a big, big way. But obviously he doesn't share my opinion and he's my best mate, and what can you do? I have to put up with him.

The one thing he says, finishing his tea, is "Do you think they've found him yet?"

He wanted to call the peelers last night, but I told him no. Talked him out of that one. I don't know why. Do it anonymous and from the payphone and it's not going to make any difference at all. But I just didn't want him to. So since then, I've had to put up with it.

"Yeah," I tell him. "Streets are too busy. Somebody must walk that way to work, y'know?"

"Okay."

Then, since I wasted my money on breakfast, he wastes his money on the cab to get us home again. It's still early. We creep along the entry behind the houses, and I leave Conor at his own back gate first. He still doesn't look well. Tell him to try and actually sleep this time. And then I edge on down to the yard of our house and listen a moment at the back door.

A hairdryer is drowning everything else out. Which means Caoimhe, at least, is up. I'll have to be careful of her. It's too early for Ma or Mena. Cathy will already be at work. The hairdryer will have woken Niamh, but she probably won't be up and around yet. I get the spare key from the lintel and let myself in. Close the door quiet. The hairdryer is loud enough to cover my steps and the squeaking stair. I just have to get past Caoimhe in the living room, and she's got her back to me.

I get all the way up and into my room, through the door. And then the floorboard outside the hot press creaks and I jump into bed, pulling the duvet over my clothes and up to my neck.

Ma doesn't knock and wait to be asked in. She sort of taps the door with her knuckles on the way to the handle and just opens it anyway. She always has. It's been the bane of my life for as long as I can remember. This morning, that tap is just enough for a pause for me to tuck the toe of my shoe back out of sight. "School," she barks. And that's it, she starts to move on. This will happen at roughly five minute intervals for half an hour, after which she will then come on in and drag me out of bed by the ear.

"Not going."

That stops her. She leans in a bit, "And why not?"

"Sick."

Her eyes run over the shape of me, bundled up, and I pray the hood of my coat isn't showing. "Hungover, more like," is the appraisal. Then, barking again, "_School_."

"Fecking only had one."

"Don't swear at me, James." Not fair. 'Feck' is her favourite bloody word and it's not even like swearing anyway. "Now get up."

"No, I'm really sick. There's a bug going around. Conor's got it too, that's why we didn't stay at Noel's last night, we came back." That's not bad actually. Pretty plausible, for something off the cuff. _Cuffs_; I make sure my hands are well up under the covers.

"Caught it off Conor, did you? And where'd Conor catch it off of?"

"Maria Jameson, more than likely," I say, and pull the covers up over my head. And wait, and listen, and wait, and finally the door closes and she walks away. Then I get up and get changed and get back into bed, for real this time. No staring this time, no muttering mate across in the dark. No, this time I slide off easily into a deep, peaceful sleep.

The next thing I know about even still existing is Ma again, but this time she knocks the door properly. "Jim?" Waking, I turn over and grunt. Try to sit up as she comes in. Actually looks worried this time. Maybe because I've been asleep for, as I check my watch, the best part of twelve hours. "Conor knocked the door. Wants to know if you're feeling any better."

"I'm okay. Tell him to come up."

I manage to get dressed before he appears, but I'm still yawning. "Oh, I'm sorry, did I get you up?" he says, dead sarcastic like. He's in a better mood anyway. Cracks a smile, even, and aren't I blessed to see it… Sorry. I'm not at my best when I'm only up. Even at eight o'clock at night, I'm not a morning person. Conor knows this. He ignores the fact I don't answer him, comes in and sits down on the bedside cabinet. "You missed day fifteen, y'know. Not that anything happened, but if it had, you'd have missed it. Oh, and Noel knows we stayed last night."

"What?"

"Must have left the rest of the drink there."

"Shite. What'd you tell him?"

"Nothing, he didn't give me a chance. He called and said 'Found your tins, y'pair of lightweight little shites, we're all drinking them now, watching the match, ha-ha-ha'. And then he hung up."

"Oh, okay."

Well, no, not really okay. Noel's got a job and legal ID; he can buy his own whenever he wants it and doesn't have to pander or do favours or get somebody to do it for him. That beer meant more to us than it ever could to him. We bought it as an offering, too, when we were still going to Mark's. Come on… Twisted prick, Conor's brother, he really is. Conor knows this. Conor echoes me like he doesn't believe a word of it, "_Okay_? It's not okay. He's taunting us. Now what do we do about it?"

Well, first we look over our mate to check he's not a replicant, because this is not the shook-up, sickly fella I dropped off this morning. But he's definitely still a real flesh-and-blood Conor. Maybe he's just getting over it a bit? Maybe he's pretending to be over it in the hopes that it'll stick, like when you fake a smile and start to feel happier. And then, once we've satisfied ourselves that we're still in human company, we turn our thinking brain to the problem Noel has presented us with, to getting ourselves some justice.

Justice is the word that does it. "An eye for an eye."

"Yeah, and how do you work that one out, fecking _Einstein_? We can't exactly go over and drink _his_, can we? They're all over there. Him and McGann and the girlfriends and everything, and-"

"Then McGann's place is empty. And is within walking distance. Let's go and watch the match."

Yesterday he would have turned his nose up at breaking and entering. Tonight he's completely game. I'm not questioning it. The last thing I need is him relapsing to what he was this morning. If he's up for it, then this is what we're doing.

I hate Tommy McGann anyway. He's just… _nobody_. Like, for one, he works in a supermarket. And he hates it and he fucks up everything he touches, but he still works there. He'll work there until he gets fired. Then there's where he lives. Bottom floor, amazing old house, great big space. And yet it's a dump. He keeps it a dump, like he just can't be arsed. There's not even proper furniture, there's a charity shop sofa which is broke on one end because him and Noel dropped it bringing it down the stairs, and not even proper bookshelves, but the rickety metal kind people put up in their garages.

The latches on the big sash windows are crap.

His telly's crap too. Trying to get the match I don't even want to watch tuned in takes fifteen minutes it's still grainy and guttering.

His girlfriend's a bitch. Her stuff is everywhere. I've met her twice and I've only ever heard her say the word 'Hi', because after I hear her voice I'm just thinking about how I can get away from her. I think her name is Jane.

What I mean is, he's just a loser. He's just _nobody_. I walk along the front of his fireplace, looking at a mantel full of trophies from when he used to fight, which is another thing he packed in, but he still keeps the trophies on display. "Conor, in five years, if I've turned into McGann, you have to promise to shoot me. In the head, so even the idea of it gets completely destroyed. Okay?"

"The _second_ you turn into McGann," he shouts through from the kitchen, "I'll shoot you in the head. It's infectious, y'know."

"Oh, yeah. Protect yourself, absolutely. I'll understand."

He comes back with better drink than we left for our enemies and something held behind his back. I watch, waiting, until he brings round a little bag of grass and skins and says, "Ta-dah! Look what I found in the bread bin."

Within half an hour, even football has become interesting. Well, a little. It's interesting when something is happening. All that running about in the middle of the field, that'll never be interesting. I look up when I see the white of goalposts out of the corner of my eye. In between, I am distracted by something else entirely.

There is one thing about Tommy McGann that I don't hate, and that's his pet. His name is Lewis, and he's a bearded dragon. Not a lizard. McGann is unbearably particular about that. I don't blame him. I look down at the calm, scaly beast, sitting happily on my chest where I'm slumped down, moving nothing but his big black eyes, and I'm happy enough to call him a dragon. With the back of just my first knuckle, Lewis is letting me stroke his head. I want a bearded dragon. We should kidnap Lewis. That would really teach them all a lesson. We could ransom Lewis. I bet the look on McGann's face would be priceless. I bet he'd pay through the nose. People get really attached to their pets. There's a plastic tub of lazy-looking locusts over by his tank, so I fetch it, and feed him one just to watch his toothless mouth close on it.

A long time, the peaceful quiet between potential goals while Conor hangs on every move of every overpaid, leather-booting arsehole, me and Lewis just sit and be easy-going with each other. I want a bearded dragon. Or I want to be one. I don't know which. This isn't the time to be thinking straight.

"Conor?"

"Yeah?"

"You're alright, aren't you?"

"Yeah."

"Okay."

Then the door upstairs opens and closes. Conor looks over and says, "Shit!" and in seconds we're both over the table again and back out the window. I reach back inside to put Lewis on the table, sorry to leave him. I drop out of sight beneath the window just as McGann comes down, "What the _fuck_?"

And the girlfriend is with him, because her whiny, murderous voice half-screams, and the scream dies into, "Oh my God, Tommy, it's out, it's out-"

"Jean, can we focus? Somebody's been in the flat." Next to me, Conor goes into a fit of giggling, doubles over to stifle it. Just looking at him is setting me off, rolling about under the window. We need to move, though. I shake his arm, but he's not moving, not capable of it.

"Cage it, Tommy. _Now_. It's _disgusting_, having that lizard running around everywhere."

McGann bawls right back at her, "He's a bearded dragon."

Conor loses whatever control he might have had and laughs long and loud into the night. There's swearing from inside and this time when I grab him he comes with me, struggling to his feet so we can just run, and run, and laugh, and run.

* * *

[A/N – If you're catching the Dead Bodies stuff, congratulations on having fine taste in movies. I know the years and ages don't match up, I really do, but I just couldn't resist doing the Double-Scott. If you're not catching the Dead Bodies stuff, go and watch it. Now. It's not _good_? But it's so much fun…]


	5. Fourteen Days

We're both grounded. Tommy called Noel called his Da and Conor didn't cover up right and that's how it happened. Fecking jungle drums. And the bitch mothers are in league. We came down the street together after school and they were both waiting, like we're not even supposed to speak to each other.

In old notebooks, on empty pages, I write the number 14, fourteen times over, over and over, until I don't want to tear them all open with my bare hands anymore. It takes a while, but then again I'm not allowed out of this room, so I've got all night.

A little after six, Cathy brings me up dinner, on that stupid flowery tray that's been in this house at least as long as I have. There's a faint smell of bleach. Caoimhe must be doing Ma's roots downstairs. "She hasn't poisoned this, has she?"

Cathy rolls her eyes at me. But she smiles. "I made it."

"Did you leave it unattended at any time?"

Which makes her laugh, as far as the youngest of my sisters ever laughs. She _wants_ to, but she won't open her lips, so it's the sort of stifled humming noise that cuts right through you. Cuts right through the house too and she's heard downstairs. Mena, not Ma, comes out to the hall and yells up, "Cath! Get out away from him."

I wish she wouldn't go. Just tell Mena to get stuffed and open her mouth and fecking laugh, for God's sake… They did that to her, y'know. They left her that way, scared to make noise. And yet when they call she obeys. She goes to the door and says, very very quiet like, "Are you alright?" I nod and she closes the door behind her.

Not even hungry. I cut two sausages into seven pieces each. Roll peas around into fourteens and am shocked to find the number is exactly twenty eight. I stack fourteen chips to the side. There are nine left over, so I eat those. Solve that problem, anyway. But I'm not hungry, and even that little sticks in my throat. It'd be a laugh if I really was sick now, after pretending. But it's not a bug or a virus. It's in my head, buried behind the countdown and all the other numbers. I was trying to hide it, but now I can't eat.

It's eyes. It's the junkie I shot, and the fat hag that stood over him staring at me. It's the dead man.

It was in the papers today, about him. I was stuck in the study at school with nothing else to do and I found him on page eight. I was right, y'know, he was from the North. An informer, which doesn't really surprise me. He must have come down here to hide out and somehow he still managed to run across the wrong people. Some people have no luck.

It's the way I felt when I fired and the bag snatcher just fell. It won't leave me alone. I want it back. It hurts me to want it as much as I do. I can't eat because I don't want to. I don't want anything except that sensation again. Standing, watching him in pain, not understanding and knowing I chose to do that to him. That was my decision and these were its consequences and they were beautiful. And the way the woman looked at me… They looked at me that way when stories followed me from London. They still do, sometimes. Nothing ever came of it and in a day-to-day way people have forgotten, but they remember, sometimes. They look at me and they don't laugh and say 'Oh how silly we were, believing that'. They don't look back and laugh.

Maybe, when they're all looking at you the same way, maybe you just shouldn't argue with that. It's just that I'm not the kind of monster they're thinking of. I just want that feeling back. Of taking action, and achieving what I set out to do. That's what you're _supposed_ to do, in life. You hear that everywhere. They tell me that at _school_, fuck's sake. That's what Conor's getting at whenever he goes off on his American Dream rambles.

He could have it all wrong, y'know. Maybe it's not a place. Maybe it's a feeling.

I pretend to be busy when Niamh comes for the tray. Apparently Cathy's not to be trusted anymore. Niamh bitches about me not eating, but I'm not listening. Pretending to do an essay I wasn't going to be arsed with because the due date's not until after I'm gone. Three-thousand words, a reasoning for and against the Creature's revenge in Shelley's _Frankenstein_. I wasn't going to bother. But I'm feeling Creature-ly now. Among sets of fourteen 14's in the backs of old notebooks, I write down;

_Because otherwise Frankenstein had got away with it. You make a man because you want the power over life and death. But you can't do that and then just abandon the creature because you can't handle it, it doesn't work like that. You're responsible for what you've made. If the creature doesn't come back and kill his fiancée and drag him off across the north fecking pole then there's no point. He got away with it. The creature takes his turn at power because Frankenstein was such a dick about it._

Obviously that's not the version that would make it into any finished piece. And it's only a reasoning _for_ the revenge. I do try, honestly I do, sit back and think about a reasoning against it. But being the bigger man really isn't doing it for me, these days. That's not a justification for anything, anymore. If everybody was the bigger man nobody would get anything done, ever…

I write most of the three thousand words explaining why I can only ever get half-marks for the essay, and explaining how I don't care because I won't be there to hear what the marks are. I just can't think of any good argument why the creature shouldn't have come back and done everything he could to make himself known and understood. His demands were reasonable. He wanted his existence to be acknowledged. Yes, he asks for that in the form of a mate, but the core of the request is the same. 'I am real. Give me something that will make me feel real.'

To which the only real counterpoint is, 'Why ask _Frankenstein _for validation, after getting rejected?'

Who the fuck else would it ask?

The world is the mess it is because too many creatures just walk away and leave too many Frankensteins to get on with their petty little lives without consequence. Too many accidental monsters in the world with nothing to live for, too many ignorant pricks acting like nothing ever happened. Well, I refuse. I don't know what to do about it, but I refuse.

Make me real.

I know I'm only writing a daft fecking essay, but that sticks with me. It's not the kind of thing I usually think about. I'm not that sort of a wanker, more of the time. But tonight, it sticks. I've been stuck in this room too long, that's probably all it is, but it sticks. Make me real. Something to make me real. Something to make me real. And to punish my Frankenstein. To make him take responsibility. Whoever that turns out to be, to make him stand up and say, 'Y'know what? This is all my fault. Anything I lose because of this, I deserve to have taken from me.' Or words to that effect. I should look up how the actual Frankenstein expresses it in the book. He has a revelation on the ice, but I don't remember it, word for word.

Something about a high destiny, until he fell.

I listen to the house shut down for the night. Dishes done, showers taken, lights going off, tossing and turning finally stopping a little ahead of midnight. Then I get properly dressed, like for going out, get my coat and keys. Carrying my shoes, I inch downstairs, skipping the one that squeaks, and escape.

This isn't worth it, really. If I get caught again… Well, wait, hold on… what can she do to me? Short of putting a bolt on the bedroom door, and even then I could probably get out my window. It's small and I've never tried, but looking at it, in my head? Yeah, there's always the window. What can she do to me?

Fourteen frigging days, remember? It's _thirteen_ now, if you think about it, but then again I haven't slept.

So I sit on the front step and put my shoes on. And then I walk with confidence and happiness down the deserted street. Nobody's up to see me. I think of people who go through their whole lives trying to be seen and noticed and it makes me laugh. There's no victory in that. That just makes you dependent on the people looking at you, on their attention. That's a craving, an addiction, like anything else. Look at me, I can sing. Look at me, I shag models. Look at me, I built a man… The only place that ever gets you to is the end.

But this? This is where you can really get stuff done. As I walk along I dream I'm made of the same stuff as the air. Invisible.

_I was dependent on none and related to none_. That's from Frankenstein. It's a bad thing, in the book.

I walk, and walk, and walk. I have no idea where I'm going. Sometimes I don't even know where I am. Then I'll see something that makes sense, gives me my bearings back. On the one hand it's relief, because I still have to get back before morning. But on the other hand I hate it. I'd be happy to be lost.

There's something wrong with me. And yeah, wipe that smile of your face, ha-ha, very funny, of course there's something wrong with me, but I'm being serious. You should feel the way my heart is beating, like it wants out and nothing's going to stop it. This time I really do feel sick. It's purely physical, though; my mind is calm, and there's a sense of being _right_ I've been nosing at and never really felt in a long time. This isn't just me out for a fecking dander, this is more important than that. There's something out here I'm supposed to see. I know this because I keep seeing it lately. I don't believe in all that karmic destiny bullshit, but… I don't know. I know when somebody's trying to tell me something, that's all I mean.

I just walk, and it must be hours now. I need to turn around. Exhausted, sore feet, shaking legs, I need to turn around or I'm not going to get back in time.

But that's when I see it. Lights on in a window. They're the first I've seen in a while. That's enough to draw me over. It's no farther away, really. What have I got to lose?

It's too late for normal people to be working, but you could almost forget that, looking through that window. It's an office. Like any other. Dark wooden desk, filing cabinet, pot plant, the works. An overfilled ashtray. A Glenlivet bottle, nearly empty, and a measure in a cut crystal tumbler. Not an office like Ma wishes Niamh would get a job in. The kind you earn.

There's a deep leather swivel chair, and in it there is a man smoking, and talking into the telephone. The back of his head is not inches from me at the glass. I can hear him. He's talking in the exact same tone in men in the pub on our corner use to talk about the price of petrol, about their bosses at work, about the constant rain. Just normal. Just everyday. Just conversation.

He's talking about five hundred thousand American dollars. I think it's the fact that he has to talk about it in dollars that just makes it even better. And then there's a pause while the other end of the line tells him something. To which his reply is, quite simply, "Well, get rid of him then."

This sounds like nothing. This sounds like every stupid gangster movie you've ever seen. Money and murder, yeah, yeah, yeah. Who wants anything to do with that? That's not what I'm looking for. And yet I can't look away.

It's just the _way_ he says it. It's the thing I want.

And then, which I hadn't seen before, the woman with her head in his lap sits up suddenly straight and sees me. She shocks me as much as I seem to shock her and I fall back, away from the window. My feet aren't sore anymore. For the second night running I just get up and run.

Nobody's laughing this time, but I'm not afraid either. I'm not afraid.


	6. Thirteen Days

Okay, so this morning I'm afraid. I've slept through the boredom or the exhaustion or whatever it was left me so very _clearly_ high as a kite last night, because I definitely wasn't being sensible and now, this morning, I'm actually really pretty fecking afraid, alright? Wouldn't you be? Fuck knows what that bastard thinks I heard, or what he thinks I was doing standing there in the middle of the fucking night.

I'm dead. That's it, that's all there is to it, I'm _actually_ going to die. I'll just have to stay inside forever with a cop at the door and learn to use something more powerful than the air rifle and even then, there's always the fucking window, isn't there? What if they send somebody to the window? How do I defend myself at a window? I'll get kneecapped until they're convinced I didn't speak to anybody and then they'll shoot me in the head anyway. I don't want to get kneecapped. When I was very young somebody got kneecapped outside the pub around the corner and I still remember the screaming. You could hear it from our house. I don't want to get kneecapped for not even really hearing anything and only because I got pissed off and went a bit mad one night. It was stupid, it was really, _really_ stupid.

Ma's been doing her five minute calls every time she walks down the landing for the better part of an hour now. So this time she opens the door and comes in. "Up!" she demands. "Come on." Then tries to grab my foot, sticking out from under the covers, but I draw it back. Trying to keep her temper she starts in, "C'mon. TGIF." Not really. TGIF gives them whole empty weekend days to come for me. Just the thought of the weekend makes me curl up tighter, trying to hide my head, but I'm running out of duvet. "Jimmy?" she starts in. "You're not shivering? What's the matter, are y'not well again?"

Her hand stretches out. I feel it rather than seeing it. She's trying to figure out where my forehead is, to take a temperature. And I can just imagine that warm, rough hand printing itself in the greasy sweat. So I sit up and tell her, "I'm okay. I'll be up in a minute."

That's not worry brings her brows down, sends her backing out of the room without another word. Don't look at her and think 'Aw, what a good mother', not getting angry with me, pretending she's worried, don't think that, please. She always looks at me like that. She's always been trying to figure out how fucked up in the head I am, trying to put a number on it, maybe, on a scale of one to ten. It fluctuates. Somedays it's only a two or a three, which is the normal expected level around here, believe me. Sometime, she gets this look on her face and just leaves me alone. Like I might bite. I wish I could let her know somehow; this is nothing to do with being fucked in the head. This is just to do with being absolutely fucked.

But I have to go now, I've told her I'll go. Anyway, I'm probably safer at school. I'll just be one of the faces hovering over a crowd of uniforms. I'll fade out at school.

Half-dressed, I beat Mena to the bathroom and close the door. The mirror shows me what had Ma looking so concerned; I already look like something dead. That can only be an omen. I try and wash it off, but under the layer of sweat are patches of wax and patches of sandpaper. Now I look like I've been dead for a couple of days.

Then I'm trying to do up a school tie with shaking hands, which I've only ever done because of hangovers. Past concentrating, past Mena beating on the door, I hear Ma down at the front door telling Conor, "Go on ahead and tell them he's only late."

"Tell him to wait!" I call, but nothing happens. Ma doesn't hear and Mena doesn't pass the message on. And by the time I lean out the bathroom door, he's gone. Mena grabs my shoulder and tries to pull me the rest of the way out. I pull back and slam the door, trapping her wrist. And when Ma comes up to see what made her eldest shout and swear, I tell them it was an accident, and even I don't believe it.

I don't want to walk on my own. It's Friday; Conor's got training after school. He'd have his hurl with him, in case anybody came for me. Conor would have knocked the fuckers' blocks off for me. What've I got? A Tech and Design file. I'll flap the bastards to death… No, I'll fan up a dust cloud to cover my escape. It's only five minutes and I don't know how they would have found me, but I don't want to walk on my own.

Ma takes Mena away to put ice on the bruise, so I finish getting dressed in peace. Get my belongings. I try and avoid them all going down to the door, so they won't see me hovering, looking in both directions before I even open it. Then I shout, "Bye," over my shoulder, and I'm gone. Quickly, keeping my head down, I'm gone.

Once before in my life, I've been afraid this way. Nothing ever came of that. The last time I got edgy and paranoid like this, nothing came of it. I'm still here. It's never come to haunt me. The last time this happened I came out of it okay. I don't allow myself to think of anything except how nothing came of it last time until I'm through those gates. I'm safe here. These people have a legal obligation to keep me safe. And much as that might be complete shite, that's enough for me right now.

I'm not all that late. I'm at the door of our registration room just as Conor is answering for me, "He's coming, sir, he's just late."

And somebody else, half covering it with a cough says, "Stoner."

There's general laughter. And then I let myself in and that all stops. Does wonders for how you feel about yourself, when your appearance can silence a room that was already laughing at you. I mumble my apologies to Tierny, who is staring the same as anybody in the class from behind his slightly-bigger desk, and he doesn't even ask me for an explanation.

Conor pulls my seat out for me. Like I don't look capable of even that. "You look like a cancer patient," he says.

"Thanks."

"No, seriously, what's the matter?"

"Nothing. Will you skip training and walk home with me?"

From the top of the room, our fat shite of a tutor snaps down, "Cleary! Moriarty!"

Both us, in bored sync, "Sorry, sir."

On the English homework he's trying to finish, Conor writes, 'y?'

I write back, 'doesn't matter.'

During the four classes between registration and lunch, I get asked three times if I want to go to the nurse. On the last one, with the fellas getting used to the question, that same wanker as this morning takes his little coughing fit again. This time the word is 'poof'. Because nobody turns down the nurse. There have been more dives taken in these corridors than on any football pitch in the world, in the name of the nurse. But she'll only ask me what's wrong and I've already had that twelve times. Seven of them joking, two of them disgusted, three actually a little bit worried. Although, one of the worried ones was Maria Jameson, who obviously has her own reasons for caring. The idea of me dying puts her whole collection in danger.

I keep looking out of windows. In films they always come in black or silver cars. Black and silver cars are now the enemy. They're also fecking _everywhere_. And there's _trees_, practically woods, down behind the playing fields and they could come up that way. That's even worse. I won't be able to see them if they come up that way.

But I get through as far as lunch time and nothing has happened yet. Like any other day, we go down to the canteen, and I hold seats while Conor gets in the queue. It means I'm on my own for a bit, but I'm in a crowd and away from any windows. Invisible. Invisible doesn't feel as good as it did last night. I really lost it, didn't I? I mean, went _proper_ mad. It's not fair. They can't send you to prison if you were mad when you did it, but somebody can still fecking murder you for it.

A shadow falls over me and I look up way too fast. But it's nobody to be afraid of. It's Paddy Hegarty. Hateful prick stole the captain's place on the gaelic team while Conor's granny was dying and he was off. He's after the hurley cap too, but he'll get the hurl shoved up his arse before he gets that. There's not a month of school left anyway. I used to tell Conor we should stay until the last day and then tell him he could have it, just to see his ugly fucking face crumple up. That was before we got this close. Now I'm not staying an hour longer than I have to.

"Can I help you?"

"Y'know," he says, leaning on the table, "Y'shouldn't take the shit if you can't handle it."

"What?" Oh, don't get me wrong, I know what he's saying. I just want him to hang himself for me.

"It's not like you could be any more obvious about it. I'm just saying, it's not the kind of thing people around here want to think they're living with."

Which makes two strikes.

"What're you talking about?"

"I'm only being friendly. You'll get your ma and all them sisters burnt out of the house along with you if people start thinking you're that kind of scumbag."

Which is a very strong third strike, don't you think? So my first strike in reply is equally strong and connects dead on with his ugly tomato nose. He falls back holding it, all that sudden blood rushing between his fingers, eyes watering. And the whole canteen erupts with chairs scraping back and overturning, the crowd getting up and round. The chant goes up, '_Fight, fight, fight_,' but I have to disappoint them. Hegarty's already on the floor, can't see straight. The nose is always a good first gambit. In a real fair fight, Hegarty'd just sit on me and crush one of my own ribs through my heart. But this time, he's already on the floor. I chance absolutely nothing falling down on top of him and following that first punch with a couple more. But it's not enough. It's still not what the fucker deserves.

From the corner of my eye, leaning against the wall, I see Conor's hurl sitting with the rest of his stuff. Stand up, grab it. Things go a bit fucking quieter then, bit of hush please, while we see if he's really going to do this. Maybe I don't have to such a bloody disappointment after all.

There are so many reasons this was the wrong day to cross me. Thirteen, y'bastard. Unlucky for some.

Hegarty's curled up on his side. I probably should have done this when he stabbed Conor in the back. But I'm doing it today, and I'm all the stronger for waiting. "What do you know?" I ask him, leaning in close. "What do you know, y'fat prick? What do you think you know?"

I swing the hurl back over my shoulder. I swear to God, I'm going to fecking love this.

Then Conor rushes up, dropping the lunch tray on his way, and grabs it out of the air by the wide end. It puts me off balance and he grabs me back by the collar, through the connecting door into the empty study.

The crowd, the fight, Hegarty, all of that stays in the canteen.

Out here it's quiet and Conor, holding up the hurl between us says, "What the fuck?!"

I look down at the blood on my knuckles. "I have to wash my hands." By now, canteen staff will have rung up to the teacher's lounge and they'll all be rushing down, so we go out the long way, round the building, and in the toilets outside the P.E. hall I spend six long minutes trying to get my hands clean and telling Conor what happened last night.

"Okay," he says, after I tell him not to ask any of the really obvious questions I can't answer, "So I'll walk home with you."

Then, before afternoon registration, we go like outlaws and hand ourselves in. And yeah, the both of us. Conor takes his detention right along with me. It gets him out of training without any messy explanations and we'll be leaving at the same time. He has to go to the rest of the classes. I get sent to isolation which, I'll be honest, is exactly where I want to be anyway. And lucky for me, the teacher in charge is Boyle, my tech teacher, who could not give a flying fuck what I've done to be here so long as I don't bother him. I work on my Frankenstein essay for the last hour and a half, then put it away before Conor joins me. Don't want him thinking I intend to be around to hand it in.

He comes in, "Sir, will you call our Mas and tell them we're stuck here? Because we're supposed to be grounded and they'll think we're taking the piss."

That whole last hour is as normal as that. I know I still look like shite, but since I drew blood I actually feel a little bit better. And there are no black and silver cars outside, or along the way home. Blue and green and red and filthy white, but no black or silver.

At home, Ma's waiting with a face like thunder, and Mena's really milking that ice pack on her wrist. I'd almost forgot about that. I get lectured, and ten minutes in, Niamh realizes what it's about. From behind me, she lifts up my shirt sleeve so my arm hangs inside like a stick, "What, this weedy wee shite? Fighting?"

Here endeth the lecture. I take dinner to bed with me and could eat the same over again tonight. Then, though it's not even seven o'clock yet, I lie back and wait for sleep to come. This day can end better than it began.

After all, the last time all that guilt and fear came down on me, nothing ever happened. Maybe I'm charmed. Maybe I passed it all on to that prick Hegarty. It's imagining the shape I could have left his face in if I hadn't been stopped that sends me almost off into peace.

Almost.

There's a knock at the door. This in itself is nothing. Ma answers it. But then there's a creak as she half-closes it again, speaking out the side like she does when the gypsies come round about paving the yard or cleaning out the gutters. "Who're you?" she says.

A gruff, heavy voice I don't recognize, not from round here, answers her, "We're looking to speak to your James, missus."

I am _actually_ dead this time.


	7. Twelve Days

The shed feels strange. We've been hanging around in the shed for years, but this morning it feels strange. Different. I can smell everything again. All the things that faded out. There's a little blue flower, very small, growing in through a cracked board.

What day are we on? Ten? No, no it's more than that, because I thought of thirteen when I wanted to kill Paddy Hegarty. Was that only yesterday? Day twelve? I don't remember anymore.

I'm out here because I'm not grounded anymore. Well, I don't think I am. I left the house this morning and nobody said anything. I mean, nobody said _anything_. They haven't said anything since last night. Niamh and me were passing each other on the stairs and she actually dodged, rather than try and walk through me like she usually does. I came in through the back door last night, and Ma was sitting at the kitchen table in her dressing gown, in front of an ashtray that looked like it was about to go up in flames. She looked up, fought for words before settling for, "Alright?"

I said, "Yeah. Yeah." And then I went to bed.

She sat up a long time after that. The second my door closed there was a rush of sisters' feet all piling down to her for the full report I hadn't given. She should have asked more questions, when I think about it. I wonder why she didn't.

I've been here about half an hour when Conor walks in. "But you're not allowed out," I say, pretending to be shocked.

"I'm supposed to find out why you got took away in a Mercedes last night, and then find out how you came back." The nosiness of Mas will always override a Da's attempts at discipline. I came up here because I _knew_ he'd be told to follow. "Did you walk up? Is there any point asking to see your kneecaps?"

"They're intact."

"Then don't bother. But the rest. Tell the rest." Jesus, look at him. He's like a little girl. He's this close to dancing, he's so excited. He's standing not three feet from me and it feels like the other side of the world. I stay sat on my crate, looking out through the ivy on the window. I can hear birds. Can never hear birds from the shed. "Jim? What'd they do to you?"

"Nothing. Why would you say that?"

He stops dancing. Looking a little bit lost now that he's been questioned. "Because you've gone all moody and quiet? More than normal, I mean. Was it… I mean, if they didn't batter you, was it… like, _psychological_?" He's trying to ask something else entirely. I have _no_ idea what it is, but it's clear, from the flaring eyes, from the little nods of the head, there's something unspeakable they're supposed to have done to me.

"Sit down, would you? You're making me tired looking at you." He sits down, though with that same look on his face like the match is on and the goalposts are on screen. I suppose that'll have to do. Maybe if I find some way to _explain_ to him the effect being in fear of your life can have on you… Or maybe I'd better just tell him what he wants to know. "You're going to have to disappoint your ma," I tell him, "because none of this can get back to them."

They came for me last night. Two big fellas in leather jackets with turn-ups over their boots. Ma, to her credit, wasn't for giving me up. She was about to tell them I wasn't there. It was Mena shouted my name up the stairs and gave the whole game away. And Ma was assured I would be returned to her in one piece. She didn't think to ask what condition the piece would be in, which is what went through my head, but that was enough for her. So I had to go, no choice left at that stage.

I was sitting in the back of that car and nothing was real. I didn't even know it was a Merc until Conor just told me. I wasn't paying to attention to anything. Just sitting there, telling myself to get a fucking grip. I'd have to defend myself, and was telling myself one word wrong could be fatal, so I'd need to get it together. It wasn't working. By the time we got there I was still a wreck. Definitely a quieter wreck, but I didn't trust myself to open my mouth.

And this time they brought me inside that office. It was weird, looking out that window, knowing that's where I was the night before. It felt different inside. Smelled of old smoke, dead thick, like it was gathered up in all the corners. I remember the floor under my feet felt wrong, and when I looked down I noticed the carpet was threadbare. That's all wrong. It should be deep, and soft. Everything else was the same, though. The ashtray, the scotch, the pot plant turned out to be plastic. There was no girl this time, and the phone was on the hook.

His name's Callahan. He seemed surprised I hadn't heard of him. He's heavy-set, but not fat; just like he carries it well. Tie pin. Gold watch.

And a gentleman. It was the girl he was worried about. She's the same girl that got us last Sunday's sermon. She's got no reputation left to ruin, but he was worried about her anyway.

And… well, d'you know the way I'm thick as shit sometimes? Because he had scared me and that was all he wanted and to know I hadn't talked to anybody about her. It was just a warning. So me, rather than just say yes-sir-no-sir-three-bags-full-sir, me being thick as _shit_… Maybe I'd just gotten so geared up to defend myself I had to go on ahead and do it, then, me, I felt the need to _correct_ him (most sensible idea _ever_, I know) and say:

"I'm not a fecking _pervert_." And then, remembering I was scared for my life, "Sir."

Says him, "I beg your pardon?"

Says me, not taking the hint, "I couldn't even see her." Then, and only then, was my life in danger. That was the only time murder crossed his mind. So I started talking. Because once you've dug so deep you can smell lava, you might as well just shoot for China. It's all a bit of a blur, so this isn't word-for-word, but I went on to say something along these lines; "Sorry to be so forward, sir, but you have nothing to fear from me. I didn't know who you were last night. I still don't know who you are. I was lost and I just saw the light on. And then you were talking, and it was the way you talked that made me listen, because I want to be able to talk like that and-"

And then he interrupted, "Talking, son?"

"On the phone, sir." Very quickly adding, "I didn't hear what about, I couldn't, through the window, but I heard the tone of your voice and I..." I ran out of words, because I realized what was actually coming out of my mouth.

Callahan took his gun out. And no, that's not a euphemism. Now, he wasn't thinking anymore about murdering me, but I didn't know that at the time, so when he came round the desk and fitted the fucking thing between my teeth, well, that was it. I mean, it was all over, at that point. A farewell to arms, as it were, and to legs and the rest of me, because I was going to be dead. He stood there looking at me down the barrel, until I lifted my eyes up to him and wondered what the hell he was waiting for.

And then Callahan took his gun away again. Says him, "Are you praying, son?"

Says me, "No, sir."

Says him, "Why not?"

Says me, "God didn't have his finger on that trigger."

A pause. Three or four seconds, which was too long. Then Callahan broke out laughing. Says, "Clever wee shit, aren't you?"

Me, still being thick, "I don't try to be, sir."

"Do you want all this?" he said. Seemed to be talking about the gun, more than anything, but I don't think that's what he meant. "The wealth," he said. "The office. The girls?"

"No. I mean, yes but…"

"C'mon, son," he said, and was tapping me back and forth about the face with the muzzle of the gun, "Explain yourself. C'mon."

And he just kept going and going, and it was really fucking irritating. I couldn't concentrate. I would have told him, only he was making it impossible. He just kept it up, those stupid little taps, not even enough to hurt, just so that I couldn't _make sense_ out of anything. So I waited for another one coming and put the back of my hand up to block it.

That stopped him.

I looked up, pointed before I remembered that rude and said, "Yeah. That look. I want to not expect anybody to do what I just did. Does that make any sense?"

That's what happened last night, or as near as I remember it all anyway. Then I was back in the car and they brought me home and I could suddenly taste what air tastes like, which I've never been aware of before. So Conor can forgive me if I'm feeling a little bit far and away this morning, can he not?

Conor is staring. Mouth hanging open and just staring. "Well, _say_ something."

"That's not the end!" is what he says, too loud and too quick for his own good. "What'd he say? When you stopped him hitting you, what'd he say?"

"Nothing important." That's lies. But I don't know what to tell him, so lying is better, for now. "Have you heard of him, though? Does this ring _any_ bells?"

"It wasn't Mickey Callahan, was it?" Yeah. Yeah, one of the turn-up-jeans lads called him Mick before they threw me into that office with him. "He's supposed to be a nasty bastard, Jim. Supposed to be into everything. I heard my Da talking with a load of them down in the pub about somebody owed money."

He doesn't have to say any more than that. I can guess. The man had a gun just casually lying around his desk and orders the occasional murder during a blow job; I think I can get a pretty good idea what happens when you owe him money. And I already sort of knew he had to be a gangster of some kind. I suppose I was just hoping, until now, that he was one of the proper kind. That he was on top of the pile, as it were. From Conor's description, he sounds promising.

"What did you mean," he says, still slack-jawed, "when you said you wanted to talk like that?"

"Nothing. I told you, I just kept digging. I don't even know if that's what I said."

This is more lies. That's the one thing I'm completely sure I said, the one thing I _could_ say. I just couldn't make it sound sensible. I have this problem, y'know, I always have; when I actually care about something, when I mean it, I can't talk properly anymore. Hate comes easily. Corrections come easily. I just have trouble making anything sound like it comes from the heart.

"So yeah," I say, just to bring this to some kind of a close, "he'll probably just leave me alone now. Don't tell anybody anything, though; I want to see what they make up."

"Aye, there'll be some daft stories alright, but… Seriously, though, did you actually stop the gun when he was hitting you with it?"

"Fuck's sake, yes."

"You're my best mate, do you know that? If anybody ever guesses the right story can I at least-?"

"Nobody will believe you."

"And did he really not say anything, when you did that? When you were telling him about the look on his face, like, did he _really_ not say anything?"

Oh, he had something to say alright. But look at Conor there, poor eejit; he's still just _staring_. And this is nothing to do with the fact that I've never been the cause of anybody's bragging rights before in my entire life but… Just _look_ at him. How do I sit here and look him in the eye and tell him –

When I made Callahan understand that I wanted to be where he is someday, he answered me with a question. And the question, burned into my brain, kept me awake, echoing with me, I can _hear_ his _voice_ so I'm sure of this, the question he asked was, "Well, then, do you want a job?"

I think I was probably lying again when I said he'd leave me alone now too. There's two hundred quid in my back pocket that I got for absolutely nothing and I'd happily wager that against the idea of Callahan leaving me alone.


	8. Eleven Days

Another Sunday. Another date on a leaflet to make it eleven days. Another bloody sermon. Catholicism would be alright if they didn't have set reading. You could pick some real glories out of the Bible if you had a free hand. As it is, you have to go to a christening to hear that bit about putting a millstone around a child's neck and bucking it into the sea. As it is, we have the parable of the fecking talents, for the seventeenth time in my life. No, more; that's just the church readings, that wouldn't include the times a Christian Brother has been wheeled into my Religious Education classroom to bark us through it. He's a bastard, that CB. He always enjoys way, _way_ too much that bit where the master calls the last servant a 'wicked, lazy shower of scumbags'.

Y'know, now that I think about it, I don't think the word 'scumbag' is in the Bible. And there's only one servant in the story, so where's that plural coming from? Oh, oh aye, he was talking at us…

For those of you that don't know it, the parable of the talents is the one where God gives one fella a load of cash, and he goes off and does business and comes back with profits. And God gives another fella a decent size sum of cash, and he goes off and does business with it and comes back with profits. (This is my impression of the Bible, by the way; if a sentence ain't broke…) And God gives a third fella a small sum of money (and here my sentence needs to be fixed -) and the third fella goes off and buries it in the ground. So God comes back and he looks at the profits of the first two, and he says Well done, lads, have a biscuit. Or words to that effect. So the third fella rocks up, with what pittance he was given, and hands it back. Nice and straight forward, here's your stuff, I kept it safe, can I have a biscuit now?

The third man gets flung out into the place where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Yeah, that's where 'wailing and gnashing of teeth' comes from. That's about the most interesting thing about the parable for the bloody fecking bloody talents…

Now, if you have the unrivalled _joy_ of a liberal, new-agey priest like our own Father Lawrence here, the kind that lets in even little psychos and divorcees, he'll spend about twenty minutes telling you the master wasn't a hard and cruel man. After all, God doesn't give anybody the sack without good cause. He's a forgiver, is the Big Lad.

On this one occasion, the liberal new-agey priest is closer to the biblical truth than your fire-and-brimstone gent down the road.

To him who is the most capable, the best equipped, shall be given the most, because you know he's going to make something out of it. That's just logic. Some people, you hand them even the smallest chance, and all they're going to do is bury it. And the guy who makes something of himself, people are just going to keep giving him things. That's right there, that's in the text. I've got myself my own leaflet this week so I can give it to you as God gave it to… whoever's supposed to have written this particular tale.

_Everyone who has will be given more, and he shall have an abundance_. _And whoever has not, even what little he has shall be taken from him_.

That must be a shite lesson to learn, if you're the kind of person who has not. I'd imagine so anyway. It was a shite lesson to learn God was no forgiver, not really. Even God's got a line you don't come back from crossing. So I can imagine how tough it would be to learn things will never get any better for you. I don't know what I'd do if I thought nothing would ever get any better for me.

This morning, Father Lawrence is asking us all to examine our own hearts and consciences and find out if we're really making the most of our talents. So here's my question to myself; is Mickey Callahan out there thinking I'll probably come back? And if I did, what would he even want to set me to? And should I just have said yes there in that office before the next heartbeat and not even looked over my shoulder?

Okay, so it's three questions, but, y'know, there's three servants in the story, or something. Anyway, I've got the whole rest of this mass to get through; one question's not going to keep me going. For Ma and the girls, it would be enough. One question would occupy them. Caoimhe's asking herself if she really can't be any better than a permanent trainee hairdresser. Niamh's asking herself if she should maybe pack in the chip shop and just go down the marriage-and-kids route. Cathy's imagining all the things she should say to Ma and Mena, and begging forgiveness of the Lord while we're sitting here anyway, the same way Mena does when she daydreams about pillows and a certain lined-and-eye-lined face. And Ma, Ma just keeps looking round at me in little glances, as if to check the three sixes on the back of my head aren't setting my hair alight yet.

Me, I don't run so deep as all that. Actually, I don't even have any questions to ask myself, because I don't know what sort of job you can take for eleven days and no more and in eleven days I will be gone. Simple as that. So, really, there are no questions to ask. There. Settled. Fuck Mickey Callahan, whoever he thinks he is. He'd probably only mess me about anyway, and I won't be here to be messed about.

But should I have said yes in that office and before the next heartbeat, should I, and if there are no questions and nothing to do but forget all of that, why am I still asking myself if I should have said yes in that same second and never thought of anything else ever again? Don't get me wrong, it's not what I want to do with my life. I don't want to be a gangster, and not in some petty quarter of Dublin, no way. But Mickey Callahan is close to something I want to be close to. I need to learn. Need to start somewhere. Should I have said yes, even just to see what he had in mind?

The sermon ends, the rest of the service comes and goes. Nobody claws me back by the hood when I make my escape after the last amen.

I go and stand right in the hall of Sacred Virgin down the street. And like any other week, Holy Joe comes out to shoo me away. I don't say a word to him. I stand where I am, between him and the main door, and keep my hands in my pockets. Holy Joe goes back to his worship without giving me any hassle. Now to figure out which story he's heard; that I nearly battered a lad to death (the local version of the fight with Hegarty)? Or that I was questioned by Special Branch on Friday night (accounts vary on what I was actually questioned about)? I hope they come up with some connection between the two soon. That might be fun. Next thing I know I'll be working within the intelligence community.

Reconnaissance from the dullest place on earth – the conspiracy against Maeve Green continues to grow. Local women overheard today expressing distaste over items seen in the objective's shopping basket…

Please, M, may I have my cyanide pill back, please?

I amuse myself for those few minutes thinking up ways I could _make_ that happen, the kind of stuff that could get that story started. In theory, I want to bring them all to a point where I could happily walk around wearing sunglasses all the time and nobody would dare laugh. But that's something else that would take more than eleven days to pull off, so I put it from my mind. I'll just leave it all to their whispering, and take comfort in the fact that when I take off, it's going to mean more to them than just a straightforward runaway.

Conor comes out the second the last bell is rung. He doesn't stop, doesn't slow down, just nods me along with him. "What's the hurry?"

"Getting out of sight. I'm supposed to be back under house arrest, aren't I?"

"Nah, c'mon, mate. That's not fair. They can't let you out to do their bidding and then put you away again."

"Well, that's what I said, but since I couldn't tell them anything useful-" After we parted ways at the shed yesterday, I went home and Conor met his parents in the pub. He was supposed to report, you'll remember, but I swore him to secrecy? So he hasn't been able to officially buy his freedom yet. His theory is if we can get clear of his lot _now_, they're not going to come running after us.

"So where to?" I ask, because I owe him this.

Conor looks up into the sky, out around the horizons like a farmer and predicts, "Sun's staying out. Up the pitches?"

This is what I get for hanging around with a sportsman… "Never got a new hurl after the last one broke."

"Borrow one of mine." Yeah, Conor knows I owe him this too. That's how we finish up on the pitches, just for him to get a bit of practice since I made him miss training. "So," he says, and fires the ball at me harder than he knows I can handle, "you actually got to stay in your house last night, did you?"

"It's been a long week alright…"

I hit the ball out of the air about as hard as I can. He stops it with the fat end of his hurl and then rolls the stick under so it's just caught there, rocking for a second. Then perfectly still. "Long for us. I know of one fella didn't get farther than Tuesday."

"Christ's sake, Conor, you're not still thinking of him, are you?" Still going on about the dead man? At this stage? The hell's the matter with him?

"You know who they're saying was behind that?" he says. Bats the ball right up and cuts down to fling it at my shins. For once in my life (probably because I'm in danger of getting a bone shattered) I actually manage to intercept it and fire it straight back, though with less of the power. Conor is unfazed. "They're saying Mickey Callahan was behind that." Yeah, well, I'd guessed he would say that. I don't see his point, really.

"And what?" This time, the way his face knots up before he hits the ball, I realize he's actually _trying _to do me some sort of damage. It's like baseball now and the shot comes thundering at me too fast for anybody to do anything about. I hit the ground so I won't end up with the ball sitting in the middle of my collapsed chest like a meteor. Watch it sail over me and keep going, off the pitch, down the grass bank into scrub. I'd have liked just one day this week where nobody tried to kill me. I've gone my whole life without anybody trying to kill me and now I'm losing count. "_What_?!"

Conor comes over, holds out his hurl for me to grab, helps pull me up. "That's not the plan, is it? Mickey Callahan, I mean, that's not the plan. That never was the plan?"

"What? Y'twat, of course it's not."

"Yesterday you started sounding like it was the plan."

"It's not."

He thinks that over, like there's anything to, like, _analyse_. Then nods and says, "Okay." Then we walk off down the hill to poke around in the nettles and long grass and get our ankles stung looking for the ball.

"Fuck Mickey Callahan," I say after too much silence. "America by Christmas, right?"

"I said it's okay."

"Yeah, but if I was lying up on that pitch with a crater where my heart should be-"

"Oh, you're so dramatic. You are _so_ dramatic. _Bruises_. Bruises at the _worst_."

So I leave it. Then, parting the grass with the stick, I come across a little collection of treasures and call him over. I nod down at it, a mess of used condoms and dirty needles at the base of a skinny dead tree. "We need to get a picture of me here. Send it to Paddy Hegarty." I do my best impression of the fat bastard, like I'm waving a photo in the air, "It's proof! Proof I tell you!" That makes Conor laugh, so I throw on some knuckle-dragger moves, a few gorilla noises, just to drive the point home.

"You're fecking mental," he laughs.

A little bit, maybe. Sometimes. We're still going to America, though. The plan is still the plan. Nothing's going to mess about with that.


	9. Ten Days

I stopped asking for attention a lot of years ago. Ma was told not to give it to me. This was a long time ago, too long ago to be holding grudges or anything stupid like that. I don't even mean to remember it, it's just something I remember. I was about seven or eight. Da was gone and I was probably acting out a little bit. It's not like it's something I'm proud of; there was a lot of biting. And then in school one days I hacked off one of Brenda Corgan's two-foot plaits with paper scissors and there were war counsels held. I wasn't supposed to be listening, but I heard them through the walls.

'Pay him no heed,' the social were saying. 'For good or for bad. Even a bollocking is still attention.'

Ma likes clear instructions. Even from the Bastard Social. She'll take them off TV talk shows every morning, so why not from him?

And it's like I said, this was too long ago for me to ever still be thinking about it. It's not even that I mean to remember it. It's come back into my head, that's all. Because years and years now, I learned not to even ask for attention of any kind. I'm fine with that. Invisible me, remember? As well-meaning neglect goes, I'd say it's set me in good stead for the rest of my life.

Then _today_ happened. An ordinary Monday, I thought when I got up. Snuck into the bathroom between sisters, stole a slice of toast the second it popped, sat out in the yard to get peace and finish my maths. Just, like, _Monday_, y'know? I should have known better. What's been ordinary lately? Really should have been paying more attention to that quiet first hour or so, trying to enjoy it.

The first I noticed anything different was just rolling up to the school gates. Conor stuck his elbow in my ribs, said, "Watch yourself, Romeo."

"What?" and I followed his eyes dead ahead. Leaning on the gatepost where I'd no choice but to walk right past her, tossing her Barbie-bleached hair over her shoulder, Maria Jameson was lying in wait. Smiling, like, oh God aye, all across her face and back again, but you have to watch the eyes. I've seen things in zoo cages that looked less like they wanted to tear pieces off me. "She's stepping up the campaign," I said. "Don't leave me alone. You need me alive, Conor, so don't leave me alone." Wasn't kidding either, but he laughed anyway.

There is, technically, in, like, a mathematical way, room for two coming through that gate, so Maria didn't see fit to move until I'd already had to pass arm to arm with her. She sort of rolled around off the pillar then, so it was the most natural thing in the world for her to hook her hand round my elbow. Just sort of looking at it, "Morning…"

"Where were you all weekend?" is what she wanted to know.

Just because he was here and not used to being ignored, Conor leant around me, "Hiya, Maria."

She flashed him a smile, but that was all. Said to me, "I thought you'd be in Ozzy's on Saturday night." No she didn't. Since the first fake I.D.s started coming down to our lot, round about fifth year, they hang around in Ozzy's on a Saturday night. It's a hole, an old man's pub that pretends, Tuesday-Friday-Saturday, to be a club. I've been in Ozzy's about four times in my life. I hate the place. There's no way she thought I'd be in Ozzy's on Saturday night. But before I could find a way to phrase that, she added, "I mean, you'd never have paid for a drink."

"Wait, what?"

"Um, Paddy Hegarty?" she said, with a tone like I must have forgotten. "Friday lunchtime?" And then she went off on a little ramble of her own, "Fat prick. I don't even know what you did it for and I know he's had it coming too long. Tell you what, there's plenty of people wish nobody stopped you the hurley stick."

Having her hanging on my arm got a little bit easier to take then. It was easy, then, to turn my head and look her in the eye and make sure she was serious. "Really?"

As honest as big empty eyes get, she looked right back at me, nodding her head, "Well, I'm one of them."

"Yeah, well," and I stepped back to show her Conor, "_He_ stopped me."

"Shame on you, Conor Cleary."

"Stopped him going away for GBH? Yeah, sorry about that."

"I'd've come and visited you, Jim."

"Thanks, I think."

It was funny. It was a good start to the day. Mondays would be easier if they all opened with something like that. Between Maria releasing me and registration, Conor muttered a few bits and pieces about her and Hegarty. He never said anything explicit, because nobody around her ever does, but it sounds like she might have had her reasons for wanting to see the hurl in action. I thought that would be the end of it.

But she was right, y'know. She's not the only one. I know this because I haven't heard so much as a breath of the word 'psycho', which should have happened by now. Nobody's laughed, either, not all day. You know the kind of laugh I mean. The kind where they have to turn around to do it, have to look at anything else, have to be on the far side of the door, but it's still about you. Everybody knows what that sounds like. I hate that sound, and I fully expected it today, but I haven't heard it once.

It's as if, whether they agree with what happened or not, people are choosing to see _why_ it happened. And they're falling on my side. Hegarty himself, by the way, hasn't turned in. I know I didn't do him so much damage he's not up and about. I'd have heard about that, surely… All I know is he's not here and I am and nobody is laughing.

Do you see now why I was remembering about attention and all that bollocks? Because I need you to understand how strange this is for me. There's more to it than simple attention as well. It's something else. I do _have_ a word for it, but I don't know yet if I'm right. Don't want to look stupid later on, so I'll not go so far as to say it right now. Later maybe. And for now? For now I'll just admit what's true here and now; it's a bloody nice feeling. As Mondays go, this is one of the best. It's a long time since a school day went past as quick and easy as this one.

Meeting me to walk home, Conor doesn't even say hello. Just looks me over and I suppose I must be smiling because he starts right in, "Aye, you're a big man now, alright…"

"You jealous fecking tosser. Just because it's not you for once."

"Jim the Giant-Killer."

"Piss off."

I'm trying to remember the last time I was in this good a mood. Counting back, for once, instead of forward. Back and back and back, actually. Last time I felt like people were really on my side over anything, when was that? Counting back ages and frigging _ages_. Counting back is depressing.

Counting forward, on the other hand…

"Ten, by the way," I say to Conor.

He says, "I know." He's trying to keep up the pretence that he's pissed off with me, but you can just hear it, just a little edge of the excitement coming on through there.

"It's like a proper countdown now. Like, we're on the launchpad, at this stage"

He laughs, "Houston, we have a-"

"_Don't_ finish that. You'll jinx us. Is there anything we still have to do?"

He shrugs, "Pack?" And then he can't be pissed off anymore and just grins. I tell him we have to pass the shed on to new owners too. This is the first he's even thought about that, and it keeps conversation going most of the way home. Gives me a bit of time to relax again, to get ready for home again, ducking around people and snatching what I can again. Not that I've gotten used to feeling good after just one school day of it, nothing like that. It'll still be a comedown, though.

But it turns out I'm not going home. Discussing various fifth years, Conor looks past me, down the road. He sees the car first and batters at my shoulder to get me to turn. Black Mercedes.

Him saying, "What do we do?"

Me, not really knowing what I'm saying, "It's okay."

Oh, alright then. If I say so. Especially if I say so in such calm, strong tones, oh, well, it _must_ be okay then. Okay. Fine. Sure.

The car pulls up to the curb where we've stopped. I can't be sure if it's the same turn-up-wearing goon as before. I wasn't paying all that much attention on Friday night. But he looks at me like he knows me, so I'll assume. He says, "Get in. He wants to see you."

Conor gets his hand in the hood of my coat, tugging like I need to be reminded we should really just both keep walking. Says me, "What for?"

"I'd like to know that myself. 'Mon with me and we'll find out together." No. I'm not getting in a car with a driver who has just made it very clear he's unhappy to have even been sent for me. No, no way. Ten days, fuck's sake. I'm allowed one near miss and Friday was it. I'm not tempting fate in that car. And yet I'm looking down at it and I can confirm, yes, that's _my_ hand reaching out to open the door.

Conor tightens his grip and pulls me. I look round and his face, before a word's spoken, is asking very plainly, "Are you mad?"

I tell him, "Stay away from Ma. Seriously, just avoid her. Don't even lie, just don't talk."

And then I get in the car and meet Bernie. Bernie's not a driver all the time. Bernie's just been trusted with this. Bernie is the right hand. He doesn't say any of this out loud, but I can piece it together, from all the huffing and sighing he does. He's used to knowing exactly what's going on, not taking direct, blind orders. Bernie was the one talking to Ma at the door the other night, promising I'd come back in one piece. Never said 'undamaged'. I remember that. I remember that _sticking _out to me…

Oh my God, why am I doing this again? Why did I get in the car with Bernie, please? Does anybody remember?

But Bernie can't hurt me, because Mickey Callahan wants to see me. Bernie can't do fuck all. Right. I'm alright. But I'm keeping an eye out the windows, making sure I know what's outside. Just in case I need to bolt at some traffic lights. Just in case.

Where would I even go? They know where I live…

Oh, for fuck's sake, calm down… it's alright. It's alright.

We're not going the same way as before, though. "Where's he want to see me again?"

"So he was wrong, then," Bernie says. "You _don't_ know it all." There's kind of a compliment in there, somewhere, from one of them. I can't dredge it up just now. Busy watching. We're way farther out than before. Back down near the river. Noel's house. Swan. Dead man.

But it's broad daylight. I'm not going in the water. They haven't brought me all this way just so I'll be easier to dispose of, not at four o'clock in the afternoon. So it's not a gloomy alley or an empty warehouse I'm being brought to. In actual fact, as Bernie stops the car, it's actually a club. And not a little dive like Ozzy's. Big, well-put together, big black pillars outside with neon lights set in them, dead and dull in the daytime. Called 'Inq', like that, with a Q. Bernie just gets out and starts walking. It's up to me to follow. The only thing I even pause over is whether or not to leave my schoolbag in the back seat and in the end I do.

Inside is the same black and purple colours as outside. But with the lights on, you see hard industrial carpet in the hall. You see a pair of cleaners in pink smocks chewing gum while they steam gum off the floor in front of the bar. You see the scaffolds that hold up the lights, and the emergency doors, and the empty spaces on the shelves behind the bar where there must have been an offer on something with Jack Daniels in it last night, because that's about the only thing I can't see.

I see all of this while I'm trying to keep up with Bernie. He knows this place, so he's not even thinking, never mind looking. Bernie's not thinking anything of it when he pushes open a door with a plate on it that says 'Private'. I'm thinking something when I pass through after him. The first time I can push a door marked Private on my own, I'll be thinking about it. Every time I push a door marked Private on my way to see somebody else, I'll be thinking about it.

The first time it's my own door, I'll stop thinking about it.

Past that door, there's a corridor, and round the corner a set of stairs, another corridor, another flight of stairs. Then, up there away from the smell and the nightly noise, is another door marked Private. This one is a metal door. I'd thought we were coming to another office, but not with a metal door, surely? What does the metal door mean? Like a fire door. Heavy, and when Bernie pushes on it, it turns out to be bolted from inside. He stops, and sighs, and knocks. "Mick," he says through it, "I brought the kid."

Aye, Bernie, mate, my old mucker, you did, aye, but the kid still remembers his way out of here, and his legs still work, so kindly tell him what the _fuck_ a metal door means when it's marked Private.

While I'm still thinking about whether or not to run, Callahan comes out and opens the door. In his shirt sleeves, and with his tie rolled up and neatly stuck in the top pocket of his shirt. His smile is like somebody's that's just come out of the gym. "Jim lad," he says, by way of greeting. Then nods Bernie past him into the room. He comes out. When the door closes behind him he leans back on it, casual as you like, "And how're you keeping, this weather?"

"Alright, sir."

"Ah, now, surely you'll be calling me Mick, now." No. Definitely not. I'll nod and smile like that means something to me, but I'll just call you nothing at all, if Sir is off the cards.

He's in a good mood today too. I don't know how I feel about that.

He reaches out with his knuckles and pushes my shoulder. If I flinch a bit hard it's only because it's the same shoulder Conor was beating at before. "What's this I hear about you near beating a lad's skull in?" Says this like he couldn't give a shite less whether I did it or not.

Says me, "How do you know that?"

He winks, "Knowledge is power, son. Knowledge is power." Yeah, and ignorance is bliss, so power sounds like a pain in the arse. I want to go home now. What's behind that door he's leaning on? What does a metal door mean? "Did you or didn't you?"

"He was talking about my Ma and sisters getting burnt out of the house. What do you think?"

"Oh," says he. Takes a second, factoring that in, making the difference. Then, "Good lad, good lad…" He stands there a moment, still smiling, still that little bit breathless makes me wonder what's behind a metal door marked Private. Silent, like he's thinking very deeply about something. I think he senses my next question coming. "You never came back to see me."

I start to lie, "My Ma was saying-"

"Don't talk shite." He reaches behind him and starts to open the door. Not enough for me to see inside. Looks round and continues, "I was thinking, about what you said. About what you're looking for out of life. It's not an easy thing you're talking about."

"I know that." Or I wouldn't have to come to somebody like you to find out about it.

And then the riddle gets answered. What's behind a metal door when a metal door's marked Private?

Answer: a mostly bare room. A chair and a table. A battered, terrified man with his hands tied out to the corners of said table, palms down. Leaning on the wall, a pair of bolt cutters, looking huge, looking like what they use to cut your ribs apart when they do your post-mortem.

But no sooner is one riddle answered than Callahan sets me another. "Do you know what makes a human being, James?" A bit big for a first lesson, that… "Not a philosophical thing. Physical. Us and monkeys, like, but do you know what makes a human being?"

"Thumbs." As soon as he said monkeys, I guessed that one.

"_Thumbs_," he echoes.

Then he picks up the bolt cutters, gets the points around the man's left thumb, and he clips. Just like that. No time for the gent across the table to beg and cry. In fact, afterward, when his thumb is just lying there like nothing, and the stump is gushing blood, I hear him say 'please' through the screaming, a couple of times, like he was going to say it anyway. The screaming itself isn't much to write home about. I've heard worse.

Callahan's point is very clear. Thumbs make you a human being. You, gent flung over the table, are not worthy of your thumbs. He steps back to look at the bloody table, at the man crying, snivelling, still moaning in pain. His smile is smaller, but true. Very content.

Then he turns and holds out the bolt cutters by one of the handles, for me to take by the other.

I ask, "Who is he?"

Callahan says, "Can't tell you that."

I ask, "Well, what's he done then?"

Callahan says, "Does that matter?"

The man over the table says things too, but they're normal, expected things. 'No' and 'please' and 'Jesus Christ'. He's not saying anything that makes me really want to hear his side of the story.

The bolt cutters are awkward at first, too tall. My hands are up next to my face, and the join of them obscures the man's face. But once they're in position, I'm surprised how easy it actually is. Yes, there's resistance, but no worse than, like, hacking apart the beef bones for Ma's soup. It takes an extra shove, a little wiggle of the blades. Not quite Callahan's neat clean clip, but in the end, the thumb comes off. I put the cutters down against the table leg and look at it sitting there.

He didn't scream this time. I hardly even notice this until the blood pools up and drips over the edge onto my shoe. I feel that and then I look at him.

Same as the junkie, same as the dead man. The feeling in me the same, in a way, as the good feeling all day when nobody laughed.

Respect, by the way. That was the word I didn't want to say, until now.

* * *

[A/N - We're halfway, so I suppose it's time to stop and tell you all how much I appreciate your support. I know this is a slower and very different kind of tale to my usual. It's a little experiment with the drama-side of my usual crime-central stuff, and the voice was an experiment, and I'm so chuffed so many of you have stuck with me for this one. You're a pack of legends. I've told you this before, but I mean it every time.

Much heartfelt hearts,

Sal]


	10. Nine Days

It's as if all the walls have come down. You can't imagine this until you've been here. Like, you suddenly realize there's no limit to anything anymore, and that really there never was, except it never occurred to you to try. The first person to sail to the edge of a flat earth and find the edge just kept getting further and further away from him, he understood this. And I'm sure there's a tonne of people who've all felt it at some stage of their life, obviously, of course there is, but until you get here, you can't know this.

A thumb comes off and the walls come down. All of a sudden you know, the only thing that ever held you back is yourself. All of a sudden you're the kind of person who can joke about what happened at Callahan's club yesterday, because it doesn't matter. What can they do to me? I'm not afraid of anything anymore.

Paddy Hegarty showed up at school today. Still with his scabby nose. Still with a big bruise on the end of his cheekbone. I was glad of that; I still have the bruise from that on my knuckles, so I'd have been pissed off if he'd healed first. That was the first good thing that happened. Then we were standing on the corridor at break, more of us than just me and Conor for once, and somebody, I forget who, nudged me. Said, "Here he comes."

You really can't miss Paddy Hegarty when he's moving towards you. You feel it up through your feet.

This smiling little voice in my ear said, "He'll eat you alive, mate. Even Big Lad'll only get scraps."

Somebody else added on, "Fee, fi, fo, fum." 'Fum' made me smile. Probably don't need to tell you why. And the best of it was, none of them were taking the piss out of _me_. It was all aimed at Paddy. He could see that. He couldn't hear it word for word, but he saw it happening. Heads turning away and little sideways glances, and even when people won't laugh out loud you always still know that they're laughing. I've lived that too many times.

"Lads, c'mon," says me, like asking them all for a bit of hush, a bit of compassion. And Paddy Hegarty had to watch that too, making his rumbling way down the hall, and watch me waiting for him. He'd come to speak to me, of course he had. But now he was considering walking on, pretending his path just happened to bring him this way. It wasn't an option, though, not when we'd all seen him looking already. So I let him get close and then I stepped up out of the pack. They hovered, but I kept everything a step out of earshot, so we can talk with a bit of privacy. Like gentlemen.

The second good thing that happened was that Paddy didn't just call me a prick or challenge me to a rematch. He had surprisingly little to say for himself, in fact. He just brought up the subject of Friday, and of the unnecessary and unfounded things he'd said, and then he apologized for it.

I considered my options and then stuck out my hand. Like gentlemen, remember? I'd started so I'd finish, as a gentleman. It surprised him, I think. There was no real grip. I got the feeling Paddy's never really thought of a handshake as a way of dealing with anything. But that just made it easier; I held hard to his hand. Not enough to hurt him, I wasn't trying to, but just so he'd know. Then I stepped in, almost past him, so nobody would have a chance of hearing when I said, "The next time you talk about burning my family out of our home, it'll take more than Conor Cleary to stop me cracking your fucking skull in. They're a shower of bitches, but they're mine. I need you to remember that. Can you remember that?"

He looked at me like I was filth. But he never said a word. And he shook. That was the real glory of it. That was the third good thing that happened. And everybody afterward was all up around me asking what I'd said, what was the matter, blah-blah-blah, and I never told them a thing.

I never could have done _any _of that last week. Even when I battered him, I couldn't have done that. It was yesterday. Yesterday did this to me, turned me into this incredible new… I don't know. I don't know what I am. It's not a bad thing. It sounds like a bad thing, but it's not a bad thing. And whatever happens in the next nine days, however it ends, I'll owe this much to Callahan as long as I live. If I never learn anything new ever again, I'll still be happy.

Conor doesn't get this. I haven't told him what I did yesterday. What I helped with, I mean. Honestly I don't really get why he's all annoyed about it. It's not like I'm lying to him. He knows a thing happened which I can't talk about it, and that it's nothing to do with him, and everything's fine. So I don't exactly know what his problem is.

He's just taken a sudden interest in doing his own homework so far as I'm concerned. Which is absolutely pointless because he'll only end up checking and changing it all against mine tomorrow. But he's got something to prove, so he's staying in, and _therefore_ so am I. I finished my homework in the study this afternoon. I know better than to try and get anything done at home. My sisters are worse than hens. They talk for the sake of talking, even when there's nothing to talk about. _Especially_ when there's nothing to talk about. They watch soaps while they take turns in the shower, so the volume has to be turned up to cover the noise of the water heater and the hairdryer.

Which is why I get a bit wary when, at prime-Coronation-Street-time, the house has fallen into relative quiet. It's just not normal. And I'm bored anyway; if a chance at the television is presenting itself, it would be ungrateful of me not to jump on it. So I go downstairs, carefully. And I don't call ahead, because that's the stupidest thing you can do. That lets them know you're coming. I just keep my eyes open and look about me. Hall is clear, and smells of hairspray, so at least one of them has gone out. We're looking good, so far.

Living room is clear. Television is off, which is a bloody strange thing even if there's _nobody_ here. I come home first in the afternoons sometimes and find the TV on. It's a good sign for them all being gone and a bad sign for everything else ever.

Nothing terrible could have happened. I've only been sitting upstairs. And yeah, with my Walkman on, yeah, fine, but… But nothing terrible could have happened.

I can't smell washing-up liquid. Dinner was over an hour ago. The kitchen should have been scrubbed out by now. Ma starts it, then gets bored and drifts and Cathy finishes it. Why's this not done? Then I let myself into the kitchen and see the back door standing very slightly open. Nothing terrible could have happened, though. This probably just means… I don't know. I don't know what it means.

I go over and pull it open a bit more. And then I fecking _wish_ something terrible had happened. As it is, it's just Ma sitting on the back step, leaning over her folded arms. Smoking too. She's supposed to have packed it in, but she still has one every so often. Times of great stress, usually, so even though she looks very calm out there, I still sort of wish something terrible had happened. She says, "Stick the kettle on, would you?"

Sticking the kettle on, over my shoulder, "Where are they all?"

"Gone to the pictures."

Fuck's sake… "Why did nobody call me? Why am I not gone to the pictures?"

"They went to see that new Tom Hanks one. I'm sure you'd have been so interested."

Yeah, but I could have got a lift with them and gone and seen Fear and Loathing, daft bints. They just don't think, it's dead selfish… Ma didn't think either, y'know. I don't even want to make her tea anymore. Mena may drive me and Conor down there at the weekend, after this bollocks. Swear to God. They've no consideration, y'know?

But I'm making myself tea now anyway, so I stay to the task I've started. Putting out two mugs just as she grinds out her feg and dumps the butt down the drain so nobody will know. She gets up and comes inside, locks the door behind her. Suddenly I know what this is about. Thinking to myself, just make the tea, mate, we can get out of this. We'll just be quick and quiet and do the job and then we'll dodge. Once we're back behind the bedroom door we're safe again.

Then I realize I'm giving myself a whole-hearted and very encouraging speech like I was two different people. Should maybe just focus on making tea for now.

I put a mug down at Ma's elbow and try for the door again with my own in hand. "Sit down," she says, that voice, pretending not to care, just being friendly... It comes over as strain and nothing more.

"I've got loads of homework." That's a lie. It's finished.

"Jim, sit yourself down." Well, she should never have phrased it as a request then, if it was always going to be a bloody order. I hate when she does that. She tries to make me agree, and when I don't, all of a sudden there's no choice in the matter. Never know where I fecking stand. But then again, I don't stand, because I'm sitting myself down, aren't I? And yes, I'm waffling, I'm totally aware that I'm fecking waffling. What would you do, if you were me, and you know the kind of stuff she was probably going to ask about next? I've read about this; it's what spies do when they're captured. They fill their heads with crap so they don't even know the right information anymore.

Ma sits there, gets her thoughts together and says, "Who was that picked you up on Friday night?"

I say, "Nobody. Noel's mate thought it'd be funny. Sent his mates round, borrowed one of their das' cars. It was stupid."

She shakes her head and says, "Then where did you go after school yesterday?"

"Just up to the shed."

"Without Conor?"

"I'm not attached at his wrist."

"Jim, he couldn't lie to save his life. Now tell me where you were." Yeah, not happening. Not in a _million_ years, Ma. You don't need to know. This is not the big thing that's going to affect your life. No, seriously, Mother Dear, stop worrying about me. Soon enough I won't even be your problem anymore. And there is no way, not on God's green or Satan's scarlet earth, not a hope I'm telling you anything about – "It's nothing to do with Mickey Callahan, is it?"

Oh.

Well, it doesn't change the argument, anyway. "Who?"

"Don't lie to me, James. There's too many people saying it for it to just be auld bitches gossiping. Half the ones round here knew that car came for you, so you just think hard for a minute before you tell me some twat borrowed it off his da, alright?"

She knows too much already to just play thick. Okay, new tack: barefaced lying. "Look, it wasn't for anything. It was a total accident, I don't even know what really happened. I was supposed to have heard something I shouldn't have. But he saw me on Friday night, he took one look at me and it was just totally obvious I didn't know _anything_, so he let me go." She rolls her eyes, not buying this for a second. What do I do, what do I do? I put a fact into it, give her something to hold on to. "It was supposed to have been the night we were in town." Her face furrows. She probably doesn't remember, didn't really notice to begin with. "We didn't stay at Noel's. I wasn't well the morning after." That gets it. She remembers that. And because that's a fact and she's thinking about a fact, all the bits and pieces around it become facts too. They'll fall apart if she gives it any thought, but she won't. She moves right on –

"Then what about yesterday?"

"I told you. Up to the shed. There's too much noise in the house, usually. I had an essay to finish."

"And what about the two hundred quid in the tin of auld football cards?"

Game-changer. Serious game-changer. "…You went through my stuff?"

"I was dipping in for a fiver. Would've put it back on Tuesday."

"Keep the fiver," I tell her, getting up. If she's not going to keep to the rules there's no reason I should even play. I don't intend to. I'm going back upstairs. I can't think of anything she could say that would stop me.

And then, for the second time tonight (and tonight's the first in a long while), she surprises me. A big, heartfelt, emotional sigh haunts me halfway across the living room and she says, "If your Da was here-"

"_Da_?" Yeah, that'll do the trick. That'll bring me back. "_What_? Where the _hell_ does he come into it?" She doesn't like the way I'm coming towards her. She shouldn't be scared. It's not threat. I'm just so unbelievably angry she'd even mention that, this one time, in all these years, all of a sudden _Da_ is an issue. "Da? The same one that disappeared before I could spell 'disappeared'? Da who said, when I was fourteen and it had been discussed with everybody but me, 'Aye, yeah, sure I'll take him,' and then bucked me back here four weeks later? That Da? How does he fit into this?"

Ma steels herself, lifts up one plastic claw and points it into my face. "Now that's not fair. He never wanted anything but the best for you."

"Oh, please don't start talking random bollocks in the middle of this, not now-"

"Don't swear at me, Jim."

"I will, actually. Tonight, I will. You're sat there talking about Da and I'm the one needs to wash my mouth out? Does it not leave a bad taste? Not at all, like? It's not bitter or anything, at all? _If your Da was here…_ If my Da was here what? What would he do?"

"He wouldn't want this for you."

"I think you're wrong. I think he made it, like, _crystal_-fecking-clear he doesn't think all that much of me. I'm not sure he'd have an opinion even if he _was_ here. Which, for the record, because, like, you're forgetting, he's not. Hasn't been. Not in a while. If he'd ever given a toss how I turned out, he never would have sent me back here."

I turn around again. And I'm not coming back to her this time, I don't care what she says. But I do stop, just long enough to listen, when she starts with, "You're right. You're _absolutely_ right. He never would have sent you back here. He'd have let you stay over there. He'd have turned you in. And whatever kiddie-prison or mental ward they put you on, he would have left you to rot there. It's the only thing ever might have taught you a lesson."

"I've told you a hundred times, I never did anything."

"Aye," she says, and sips her tea, "You've told me."


	11. Eight Days

Ma had, by the way, taken more than a fiver. It was my money that paid for the girls to go and see that fecking Tom Hanks movie. Taxis both ways, than you very much. Since it's clearly not safe to keep my money in the house, I hid it in the lining of my coat. Which sounds paranoid, yeah, but I have to tell you, because that's why we didn't stay in school at lunch. We went for chips instead. And I know that doesn't sound important either, but it was because we went off school grounds, and because I was _stupid_ enough to sit with my back to the door, that Tommy McGann was able to sneak up behind me and get me by the collar. He nearly got a fork in his eye for the trouble, but then I realized who it was.

You know him; he's Noel's mate, the dragon-keeper, we broke into his flat a week ago. I suppose I should have been expecting to see him at some stage.

"Alright, y'little shit?" and he kept tight hold of my collar. "Can I get a word with you?"

By which stage Conor, the blind bastard, supposed to be my best mate and watch out for me, he turns back from stealing red sauce off another table and sees what's going on. "Oh, fuck," is his deep, thoughtful frigging input…

"Pull _him_," I tell McGann, nodding across. "I wouldn't even know your place except for him."

"Thanks, Jim, you're a true friend."

McGann , with this false, Inspector Clouseau sort of voice on, "Ah, but which of you opened the window from outside?"

"Him," Conor says. Points at me. Remorseless. Fecking remorseless. And I can't even argue, because it _was_ me, and I did it with such incredible skill that I can't help but be proud, and I certainly won't deny it.

"Then I've got the right little prick, don't I?" And he hauled me up by the collar and said I was coming with him. I've found in my life that that sentence works a lot better when it's backed up with a black Merc and not a twenty minute walk. But he can only work with what he has, I suppose. I'll give him his sneaky entrance and his strong grip and I'll leave all that to his credit.

We've really had no choice but to talk. This would have been a _long_ afternoon if we hadn't. So I tried explaining to him why we did it last week. Without details, obviously. I told him Conor hadn't been well. I didn't tell him what had made him feel so queasy, or why we'd had to stay in Noel's, and what made us forget the fact that we had drink with us. "Oh aye," he said, "All very straight-forward, all very eye-for-an-eye."

And since then we've had a little bit of silence. I don't like it. I live with noise. You've seen all that silence can ever mean to me and mine. Silence means somebody wants to have a Chat. Silence makes me uneasy.

It's while I'm thinking of how to break it that I think of something even better. We're still a few minutes away from McGann's flat, right? So what about a little experiment? What about we see if I can't get him to stop hating me before we even get there, maybe? It's probably not possible, but it really sounds like something I should try anyway. It sounds like something I should start practicing. Don't ask me why, or what's put it in my head. It just feels like something I should be able to do. Honing my skills, as it were.

So I start, quietly, just testing, "How's your Jane?"

"Jean. And she's staying at her _mother's_."

Okay, wrong way to go. I need to be giving this a bit more thought. What do I know about him? What's close to his heart?

"I liked your dragon." He's ignoring me now, like I'm just talking too much bollocks for him to even listen to. But that's not an all-out rejection and he can't help but hear me. "It's just cool, y'know? Because loads of people keep lizards and geckoes and stuff. You never see anything like him about, though."

"Yeah, well," and there's almost a little relent on his voice, "I wanted to keep snakes but I can't be running the heaters all the time."

"Nah. Only men with tiny cocks keep snakes."

He stops then, just on the corner of his street. Asks with a really nasty grin, "Are you flirting with me?"

Says me, "Fuck off," and he laughs. Like he's gotten one over on me. But it puts him in a better mood. He doesn't talk to me again, but every so often he'll still laugh. He doesn't know I made him do that. It's nice. It's another new, good sort of feeling. He's done what I wanted and not even been aware of it. This sounds like a really petty sort of victory. Probably it is.

I follow him, not to the front door but round the back, to the window we snuck in at. From upstairs is the sound of loud, classical music, tinny and irritating even at this distance. "The hell's that?" I ask, looking up.

"Fecking _housemates_," he bellows, knowing he won't be heard, raging up at somebody who doesn't know he's even there. It's a sad sort of a thing to have to watch. "Auld lad up there and his _bloody_ radio…" I can't help but be a little embarrassed for him. Oh, woe is me, me and my shite life, and what? What am I doing about it? Um, well, actually, um, fuck all, really… It's disgusting. But then again, I'm playing at keeping him on side. So I keep my mouth closed, and stand by while the sudden anger goes off him. Then he reaches out and thumps the window frame with his fist. "Now. Show me how you did it."

Jean, he explains, won't come back until he's made the place secure. Me, I am utterly engrossed in unwrapping the unbent paperclip off my keys. That is my task. I'm not even thinking when I ask him, "So why have you waited so long to come and get me?"

"Because I've had peace and quiet for the last week."

"Well, then, why now?" He flounders, mouth moving as if there are definitely words, but he doesn't really want to say them. Then he stops trying and just slaps me round the back of the head. "Oh," I say, "It's like that." Me, I'm not making comments, I'm not offending anybody. I'm bending the end of the wire into a hook and that's all I'm doing.

"You carry that around with you, do you?"

"In case I get locked out," I explain. He doesn't even cop on that I keep it _on_ my keys. Just takes what I told him and lets it ride. People are so frigging easy it's an irritation.

Anyway, I just show him how I got Conor to heft up the rank wood sash as far as it would go, and wormed the hook in under the edge. It grabbed onto the old, basic latch and pulled it most of the way, when another good upward push on the window jolted it the rest, and everything lifted. I could have told him all this while I finished my chips. My chips are probably still sitting on that table going cold. No, no, that's not true. Conor probably ate my chips. He probably smothered them beforehand in that disgusting mix of red and brown sauce he'd already murdered his own with, and then gobbled the lot, the fat bastard…

"It's not your fault, really," I tell McGann. "It's your windows that are crap."

"So just _nail_ the sash down, that's what you're saying."

"You could nail something over the latch and block it in. Probably wouldn't be able to hook it, then."

I could have told him all this at the chip shop. That's what annoys me more than anything. Like, he just sort of sighs then and says, "Piss off back to school." Like that's it, we're finished here. There's no acknowledgement that I've done him a service or anything. It's just 'piss off back to school' and we're done. I don't think that's right, y'know. I think, when somebody helps you out, no matter what way the history is, you should always acknowledge that. 'Fair exchange is no robbery'. That's something people round here say all the time. You'll forgive me, then, if I'm left feeling like Tommy McGann owes me a little something.

Don't know what it is yet, but I'm sure I'll figure it out.

But for now, yeah, fine, I _piss off_ back to school. I'm ten minutes late and 'family emergency' doesn't go over. Missing afternoon registration is officially a truancy. So that's me in another detention. Really, _really_ starting to feel like Tommy owes me something now.

I sit down in English and Conor pushes his notebook across the desk at me. 'Wat mcgann want?'

'wants murdering,' I write back. 'hope he gets hit in the head and dies.'

'that's depressin'

'he is v. depressing person'

I don't know what else to tell you about Wednesday. Nothing else exciting happened. Big Lad off the gaelic team broke his former mouth-stuffing record by two whole Jaffa cakes. Then was violently ill and got sent home. Beth Kinster fell down the Geography stairs and right through three months of Claire Kelly's art on display at the bottom. Some people are putting air-quotes around the word _fell_. There's a fire alarm during the last class, but it was just a secretary burning her afternoon toast. I don't know; once upon a time that would have seemed like a busy day, and with the McGann thing just to top it all off.

But I'm sitting in detention after it all, with two third years who got caught copping off behind the drama building, a repeat chewing-gum offender and various other minor infringements and, well, none of it really seems all that _interesting_ anymore.

I'm bored, actually. And not just because I'm in this silent room and I can't bring myself to do anything. It all just feels so… ordinary. So I write over and over like I did before, this time writing '8days8days8days', in big loops without lifting the pen. It's not working, though. I don't feel any better this time. In eight days, everything will be better. Won't it?

Yeah, of course it will. In eight days I'll have everything I've been waiting for all these years. Of course it'll all be better.

It won't be like this. It'll be the real world, and I won't be bored.

Near the end, another note lands on my desk, folded up into such a tight little triangle it takes me a full minute to open it without it tearing. I look over my shoulder to see who tossed it. Claire Kelly; I can only guess her being here has something to do with how she reacted to having her artwork destroyed. That strikes me as unfair. You wouldn't think they'd blame her for that. So I open her note and read it carefully. I have to read it carefully; it's written in neon orange gel pen that smells of peaches and chemicals and would burn my eyes out if I read it any other way.

It says, '1st final fling is tomorrow night at ozzys u shud come' Me thinking, _Jesus Christ, Maria's got agents_…

Final fling: school leavers get pissed without the constraints of formal dress. There'll be a formal too, of course, and they'll get pissed at that too, but I'm told the suits and dresses make all the difference.

I write down, 'how many final flings are there?' and hold my notebook up so she can read it from behind me. I look back and she holds up one starfish hand. Write down 'then it's not final', and show her that too.

I can feel her stifling laughter. Paper tears, that lethal pen works again. She doesn't take so much time over it, just balls it up and pelts it over my shoulder. Giggles when it nearly goes off the front of my desk and I only just catch it. At the top of the room, the bored hippy twat from R.E. looks up for no more than half a second, then goes back to her marking.

The balled up note just says 'pleasepleaseplease'.

On top of pleasepleaseplease in poison-orange, I write again, '8days8days8days'. This time it feels a little bit better. I can't really explain why. It just does.


	12. Seven Days

Claire Kelly was neither the first nor the last to bring it up; all anybody's been talking about all day is this _first_ of these supposedly-final flings. Apparently they've been talking about it for a week. You can probably understand I've been, like, a little bit distracted? It's a really weird feeling too, watching them talk about it, and get excited. The lads are all going on about drinks, and who they're going to take these last five chances to cop off with. The girls are gathered about chattering over what they intend to wear or, more often, who they're taking these last five chances to cop off with. And it's like I'm the only one standing around with any more on my mind than that. So strange to watch them, just having lives, just… And me stood here just not getting it. Why is nothing more important to them?

And did you know, by the way, that my chemistry teacher's had a breakdown? Because nobody else seems to have noticed. Which is weirder again, because he left a big, scrawly, tearstained note on the lab door. It says he just can't tolerate this place anymore. He cites both the casual collapse of pride in himself and his colleagues and 'the indifference of young minds'. Then he signs off at the bottom, and, so far as I can tell, cleared his desk and locked the door behind him. I pull the note down and take it over to the office.

I say I found it. Beyond that big window a room full of secretaries eyes me like this could be a cruel joke I'm playing and I've written it myself. Like I've got time for daft pranks these days. The auld bitch at the window is holding the note out in front of her, looking at me over the top of her glasses like she's checking my I.D. Says me, "Would you like a sample of my handwriting, Miss?"

She tells me to get out.

With pleasure. If there's no chemistry today I've got a free class I wasn't expecting. And if I wasn't expecting it, I see no reason I should have to go down to the study and sit bored with nothing to do. It's too close to exam-time anyway. If I go down there I'll just have to watch them all with their heads bent, eyes all wide like that's going to let more stuff get in their heads, in blind panic as they realize they've done _sweet fuck all_ for the last two years and now they're fucked.

They don't know, nobody knows, but I've already got my As. Conor's happy enough to walk away with no qualifications, and that's fine for him. But the reason I've been so bored all year is that last summer I paid for and sat my own exams at home. And I should get an extra grade just for being able to do that, without anybody's knowledge. Proving you're home-schooled and that you're a year older than you are when you can't involve your own mother in the process at all is definitely a skill. And yes, there were a few hairy moments and until recently I was still convinced they'd find out and take it all away from me, but that's mine. I'll always know I was able to do that.

Maybe that's why this time of year is so hard on me. Watching them all go through it, thinking they can make the difference now. It's a little bit sickening, that's all.

No, I'm not going near them. But I want to stick around and see what people say about my chemistry teacher, so I'm not going on the beak either. Kill an hour, somehow. I head for the back steps, down at the far end of the playing fields. I don't know why. There's usually somebody hanging around. As I get closer, the top of a head starts to appear; somebody sitting down on the lower steps. A familiar, teased-up, uber-blonde head, too, and with a grey-blue feather of smoke curling up next to it.

"_Jameson_!" I bark like a teacher, just to see her jump.

She cries out, "Christ!" Then looks back and sees me. Starts laughing. She slaps at me as I pass her, but she's laughing. "Oh, don't you think I'm not pissed off," she says when I laugh back. "This is just relief, alright? You scared the fecking daylights out of me."

I demonstrate my best evil laugh for her. Then, seeing we're both here, I suppose we should actually get into some sort of conversation. "What're you doing down here?"

"I had chemistry last and, did you hear? Killian's gone mental or something."

"Yeah, I've just come from there."

"Apparently he spent the whole morning making copper oxide _because he likes the colour, _dried out the crystals, then put all his stuff in a box and walked off."

"Did you see the note?"

"Fucking weird, right? So I came down here and now I can't really talk myself into going back." Before I can ask her why that is, she picks up her packet of cigarettes and holds it out to me, "Feg? Oh, you don't smoke, do you?"

"I might as well," and I take it off her. She carries a man's lighter; neon pink, yes, but with an open-legged bikini model printed on it. Nodding at it, "That's a bit int-" and then the first inhale hits the back of my throat and I choke.

_What'd you learn at school today, son?_

_Well, Ma, I learned that tobacco is really, _really_ not like grass…_

Maria giggles. Not just to stop her, "Interesting, is what I was trying to say. Your lighter."

And then Maria lies to me. She's a bit obvious about it, like; ducks her head away, free hand scratching the back of her neck. She says, "Whatever. I just picked it up somewhere. I don't even remember where." She only stops scratching because it's still sitting in her lap; snatches it up and dumps it into her oversized handbag. The reaction is more interesting than the thing itself. I find myself studying that. She's not a particularly subtle example, like, but she's still material.

It's like McGann yesterday. I'm learning again. I had stopped, and I knew everything that anybody wanted to teach me already, but now I'm learning again. This _people_ thing is a whole new field to excel in.

Except if I could have got McGann weak and on the back foot like this, I would have been over the moon. He is, after all, a first class wanker. Today is different. Even though I don't know her all that well, nor do I know that much about her except that she's a bit of a slag and that she smokes, something tells me Maria doesn't really deserve this. "I didn't know you took chemistry, though."

"Chemistry, biology, social science."

I've heard that before, that combination. A good few times actually, and every time it was in aid of the same thing; "You want to do medicine?"

She straightens up then, looking proud, "I've got conditional offers from Dundee and King's and Bristol. Getting _away_ from here." Then smiles, "Don't be so shocked-looking, you'll offend me."

I close my mouth before I ever knew it was open, "Sorry. I just had you down as… I don't know."

"Oh, just say it. Hairdresser, beautician, fecking nail technician… So does everybody, y'know, have me down as… I think you're the only person ever outright asked about it."

"So are you going to this not-really-final thing tonight?" Those words are out awful quick. I'm not even aware of _thinking_ those words before I say them. Maybe that's it, maybe that's why everybody's been talking about it; maybe everybody just needs a distraction all the time.

Maria heaves a sigh. "Ozzy's, like? People round here are easy pleased…"

"Not like you to turn your nose up at a party."

"I know. I'm just… dead pissed off today, for some reason."

"I know the feeling." There's quiet for a long couple of seconds then. She gets to the end of her cigarette and immediately starts fishing out another one. And I know she doesn't want it, not really. She just needs to be busy, while nobody's talking. If she doesn't want it I don't want her to have it. So I tell her, "I'll go if you'll go."

"Just show our faces?"

I shrug, "Might as well."

_Why did I say that_? That's what I'm thinking within seconds of the thing itself. I mean, just _why_? I don't want to go to this frigging brutal social thing. Why did I say that?

That's what I'm still asking myself at half-ten, right at Ozzy's door. It's not one of the usual 'club'-nights (scare quotes totally necessary there), but they must have got them to break out the flashing lights especially. Explained to all the auld lads that couldn't hack the loud music, "It's their final fling. Well, it's one of them…"

But I'm here now, I suppose. Conor's a half step ahead of me. He's already pissed off. Says I've dragged it all out too long, when we're liable to bucked out of here at midnight like so many rotten pumpkins.

"Oh right," I say, "so it's all about drinking time, is it?"

"What else?"

"It's not about Kate Merriweather at all, is it? You're not worried somebody else is already putting the moves on her while you're hanging about? That's not it?"

"Piss off."

"She's not interested, y'know." He gets all hurt and offended when I say that. Look at them big eyes… God, I must really be an evil bastard, to give him a puncture like that when he's trying to get all wound up. Here stands my best mate and I've left him without even the breath to call me names. Shame on me. I'd better explain. "Saoirse off the camogie team. That's the only person Kate's interested in."

"She's… she's a _muff-diver_?!" he balks.

"I think they prefer the term 'lesbian'? If it helps, Saoirse's not, so nobody's happy."

"Doesn't help."

Well, I tried. There's a look on his face, I can't help but feel I've stuck a big sharp spike in his night before we're even in the doors. I swear I didn't mean to. I pat his shoulder, "C'mon. We'll get you a drink. And then you can start looking round again, hm? Pick out some new, defenceless target to hunt? What about Saoirse, actually? That'd be revenge on top of everything else. Not to mention, you'd be, like, a _power-couple_. Y'know, Mr and Mrs GAA."

"Shut up," and he shrugs my hand off while I'm laughing.

"Chill out, t'fuck!"

"Seriously, Jim, don't start telling me about things you know nothing about."

The fuck's the matter with him? It's not just this tonight, I've noticed it the last couple of days. There's something off, like he's not talking to me. I thought it would pass but… "Conor-?"

"Nothing," and he starts shoving his way up to the bar. I hang back.

Better be nothing. I'm supposed to be taking off with that fucker in a week. Tonight's probably not the best time to get him talking about it, though. It's probably something stupid, at heart. Conor can be worse than a little girl sometimes; 'if you don't know why I'm upset, I'm not going to tell you'. He just sulks. He'll get over it.

Apparently, though, he's going to be a prick for a while first, because he gets a drink for himself and then disappears off into a different part of the crowd. Not very fair of him, really. I leaves me to shove through in his wake and get crushed up to the bar. But I'm just trying to get the auld fella's attention when somebody blurs past behind me and jumps up onto the empty barstool, crashing into it so it almost tips over sideways. I reach out on instinct and grab it by the back bar, swearing to myself. And as I right it, the person in it leans in and says to me, "Got you back." Maria. Fuck's sake, didn't take her long finding me, did it? She giggles, repositions herself on the stool and shouts over, "Barman!" He listens to her alright. He's over to look down her clingy green dress in seconds, single-digit seconds. She clacks the empty bottle of her electric-blue alcopop on the bar and says, "Another one of these and whatever this gent's having, because I still owe him from last week."

That last is talking to me while the barman goes about it. I tell her, trying to get into the mood a bit, "You don't owe me anything, M'ia. It was my pleasure."

Shouting over the music, "And that's why I have to call you a gent!" She's half-cut already. It's hard to tell if she hasn't maybe taken something else as well. She doesn't look like she did on the back steps this afternoon. "Where's Cleary tonight?"

"He's here somewhere. He walked off on me."

"The bastard. That's why he's not a gent, he's just Cleary. Come and keep me company instead."

"You're alright."

"No, please, c'mon. There's a spare seat and if you don't take it somebody else will and I can't be arsed so you have to, alright?"

Well, if I have to. Anyway, the hell else am I going to do all night? And Maria's turning out to be okay. I said it before, I've always been able to have a conversation with her, just in passing. Never really knew her, that's all. And when all that shite started up about copping off with her, I too could not be arsed with it. I think she gets that. And she hates this place, she says, and hates the music, so there's no stupid dancing to worry about. So yeah. Yeah, I take the other chair up near her. It's in between the _real_ future-hairdressers-beauticians-nail-technicians she hangs around with and the rest of the non-sports fellas, so it doesn't look bad, us sitting together. We're not really with either of those groups though.

It actually proves to be another interesting night. I get to watch her as other lads come and lean over her chair. They buy her drinks and they talk in her ear where I can't hear it over the music. And she'll talk back and then they walk away grumbling. She always necks the bright blue bottles, though. "Does that annoy you?" I ask her, after the third one.

She shrugs, "I always go home with money in my pocket."

Once in the night it's not one of her anti-freeze lemonades, but a pint. Not brought over by one of her 'gents', but by Claire Kelly. She still leans in to talk in Maria's ear, but she pushes the pint past her, towards me. Only talks to Maria, though. And then she smiles and walks away.

"You'll never believe this," Maria starts. "You'll never guess who sent you that over."

"You're probably right. You'd better tell me."

Rather than shout, she leans in, the whole thing like Chinese Whispers and just like the game I don't really trust what I hear for a moment. "_Paddy Hegarty_." I sit back and just look at her. "So says Claire, anyway."

"Aw, fuck, where's Conor? He has to know this." I crane around, spot him at the far end of the room, near the doors. Looking bored, too, so I'm glad I can brighten his night up now. I wave, try and get his attention.

Maria sighs, "He's been ignoring you all night. Why do you care?"

"Never would have happened without him."

"What?"

"Paddy never would have sent me a drink if it wasn't for Conor, because if it wasn't for Conor, Paddy would be dead." She stares, stunned, but only for a second. Then she folds her arms on my shoulder and collapses laughing. That's when I get Conor to look and wave him over. He shakes his head, though. Then he turns to talk to somebody else, where he can't see me anymore. I sit back. That's… That's really weird… "Fuck him, then. Maria, you're my only witness. Pay attention." She graciously manages to get herself under control, lifts her head up enough to watch.

Even as I tip the glass up to my mouth, she stretches up and whispers, "Does it taste like victory?" And of course I laugh and half the pint goes everywhere, which is not only really disrespectful considering it was a peace offering, but is a fecking mess. It would be an embarrassment too, if it wasn't so frigging hilarious.

"I can't believe you did that."

"I can't believe how much of it you managed to get on my dress."

"Serves you fucking right." I start to get up, edging out of my seat.

"Where are you going?"

"To try and clean up a bit. And then I'll come back and very possibly strangle you, would that be alright?" She can't answer me. She's just laughing. But then, by the time I get back from the toilets, she's not there anymore. It's okay, I'm thinking. She probably went to dry the front of her dress.

A few minutes go by waiting and I'm starting to feel very much like somebody sitting on his own at a party. Then I realize just how much time has gone by, because they start playing The Pogues' version of My Way, which usually means we're all about to get turned out into the street. I hate that song. I hate the fact that I only came to show my face and ended up sitting here all night. I hate that Maria's vanished completely, it seems. Maybe she's sick. There's a lot of empty bottles on this table, all with ice-blue dregs swimming in the bottom of them.

But I hate this song. I work through a hive of pogoing classmates all bawling the words in their best MacGowan impressions and get out the door.

The good thing about that music is everybody else loves it, so the smokers and the sick ones and the ones that got kicked out early and the bouncer even are all inside now. There's only me on the street. And then, leaning on the wall a few feet away, smoking and trying to get her eyes to focus, Maria.

"Where did you go?!"

She looks at me, completely blank, like it was any other question. "Out here."

"Nothing," she says. "My head hurts. And I hate that song."

She tries to take a couple of steps towards me and stumbles. I give her my arm to lean on. "Where do you live?"

"Why?" There's a hard edge on her voice I don't understand. "You going to walk me home, Jim? Be all, like, a gent and all? Are you going to _take- me- home_?"

No mistaking what she means. "You're pissed," I tell her. "C'mon." There's a phone outside the shop around the corner. It takes me five minutes to get her there and the walk does nothing to sort her out, so I prop her up against the newspaper locker and call a cab.

She sits down hard on a pile of yesterday's Irish Times, bundled up to go back tomorrow. Then laughs to herself and drums her hands on either side. "Yesterday's news!" she crows. "Do you get it?!"

"Now, don't get hysterical or you'll get slapped."

"I never knew you were all dead caring and all. Why did nobody ever tell me that?"

"Because it's slander."

"What's that mean?"

"Lies, Maria."

"No it's not. No, because, right, like… I know all the pigs, right? And I know all the lads who pretend they're angels all the time and then they turn out to be that they're pigs, right? So if _I_ say you're not a pig like what they are, then I'm the one who should totally know these things and you should listen."

"…The drink hits you dead sudden, doesn't it?"

Waiting for the cab, I sit down next to her on some other paper. The same news told differently. "We should do this again next week, at the next one of these, like."

I shake my head. "I won't be here next week. It'll be my birthday."

"All the more reason. I'll buy you a card."

"Don't. You won't see me again." I don't know why I'm telling her this. I'm probably a little bit raked too. It's not like I'm telling her details. It's not like she'll probably remember any of this.

Maria looks at me, very strangely and for a very long time, but that's to be expected. She can't make too much sense of things just now. "You're not serious? That would annoy me."

Shouldn't rise to it, shouldn't encourage her when she's in this state, but I can't help myself. "Would it?"

She nods, "That would make me really sad." She's just looking at me. Her eyes are green. I don't think I know anybody else with green eyes. They start to close and, once I'm sure she's not passing out, it's pretty clear what she wants. And I must be worse off than I thought, because… Well, it's not really my fault; she leans towards me and she'd fall over if I didn't hold her up. It's nothing, really, it's just my hand on the side of her face. Then she's so close I can feel her breathing and it's not a shock, really, to feel her kiss me.

It's not all that great, actually. She's too out of it and I'm not out of it enough to just go along with it. But I do hold on to her, and I do keep her there. Because… I don't know why. Because we might as well, or something…

All of this is only a couple of seconds' thought. And then it's actually Maria that puts out her hand and pushes off me. "No, wait, stop," she says, with sudden clarity. "Wait." Drums her hands on the papers again like she's trying to wake herself up. I shift very much back to my own stack of recycling and look the other way for a minute. "You shouldn't," she says. "I don't want you to." She says this with her eyes closed, with a strain in her voice I don't really understand, but I don't fecking want to just now either.

Fuck's sake…

"What about your _collection_?" I say, even though I know it's cruel.

She says, "What?"

Oh, yeah, that's right. I made the collection up… "I mean, you wanted to, didn't you?"

"Oh, yeah, aye, all that but… Look, it doesn't matter, don't ask."

So, for a little while, we just sit here. This time when she sparks up for something to do I don't stop her. I only look round because the cherry end of the feg is in my eye-line and I notice it's shaking. All of her, when I look, is shaking. And though there's no sound in it, there's a damp trail on her face catching the light from the phone box that tells me she's crying. She's not talking to me or to anyone when I hear her start muttering. At first I can't make any of it out.

Then I hear the words, 'stupid bet'. Which could mean anything, really. Could mean anything.

Cab pulls up. I put her into it and put her seatbelt on. Then I pay the driver and watch her go.


	13. Six Days

Callahan offered Bernie's services, a lift home, but I told him I'd walk. It's taken longer than I expected, actually. Couple of hours, maybe? I don't know, the time is a bit hazy. We're into the afternoon, certainly. That's all I know. My watch is right there on my arm, but it's too heavy to lift up and really, when you think about it, it really doesn't matter, does it? Seriously. I mean, who even decided all this bollocks about time anyway? When did the whole world get together and decide there would be sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour and then (to make a change from sixty) twenty-four hours in a day and then (what the hell, let's go mad) seven days in a week, fifty two of those in year, except they got the time wrong by a quarter of a minute or something, so they have to add on a day every four years and… It's really stupid, when you think about it. This whole concept, all these little rules, it's so people know how "long" to stay at work or school. It's just control. When you start to look at it proper clearly, like I am, it's all just about control. And I think about it and I really look at it and I just think… people are so _easy_.

Anyway, it's two hours later and I'm finally home. Pushing open the back gate, I see the door is already open. That's nice of them. That's dead accommodating. Thanks, Ma. Thanks, girls. There's a feg butt in the gutter, though. Not such a good sign. But I walk in, and shut the door. Over my shoulder in the living room, that fat Brit bitch that does the makeovers is bawling on the telly about how lilac is the devil's colour.

It's not. The devil's colour is the black-brown of concrete which has, over time, absorbed over and over again puddles of men's blood. Traitors and debtors and upstarts, and the dealers and thieves and perverts and junkies whose beating might rightfully be called a public service. 'Charity work', Callahan calls that. When the cops can't take another brutality case or just can't do it. But yeah, anyway, if the devil had a colour that would be it.

Over the noise of that screeching woman, footsteps. Then, as I pass in the hallway, Ma is this darkness in the corner of my eye, blocking the door. She rages, or she tries to; it's like she was angry hours ago and now she's bored. Maybe she's been up all night too. She says, "And where have you been all night?!" with as much force and heat as she can manage, but it's not much. It's all gone a bit dead in her. That doesn't surprise me, though. What's left in her, really? I mean, like, what real honest spark? Nothing I've seen anyway, not in a long time. Or maybe, like I said, she's just been up all night.

So I'm sure she understands why I walk past her, why it is there's nothing to say. Where was I all night? It hardly matters, really. In the grand scheme of things, it's not even a little flicker of light. In her life? No… No, it doesn't matter in her life.

I'm the only person it really means something to. It is all mine. It is nothing I want to share. I feel her follow me to the bottom of the stairs, but no farther than that.

Then I lock myself in the bathroom and run the shower scalding before I step into it. Hot water is unusual for me. A sister or two have usually worked through most of it by the time I get here in the mornings. It's a pity too, because I think it might be my favourite thing in the world. Nothing special, y'know? It's not, like, fine champagne I'm asking for here. It's not the rarest imported Cuban cigars. I'm not asking for a constant stream of pretty, willing girls. Do you know what I'm saying? I just like the feeling of hot water. The way it just seems to take a layer off the outside of you. I like feeling scoured clean. I like it even better today. Because today, as soon as I'm clean on the outside I know what to call the feeling inside my head.

Clean.

It's as if all the shite has been swept out of me. In my mind everything is fresh and simple. There is nothing there which does not need to be. There are no more lies. No limits.

You should see my hand. My right hand. It's the heat of the shower that's brought it all up, made it really obvious, but it's so cool. Around that little corner between my thumb and forefinger, all over the webbed little bit, is a little spatter of dark red, like speckles on an egg. You can't really see it unless you're looking for it, or unless you're me and you can feel how it's all sort of tight and dry. This is powder burn, apparently. I couldn't see it before, right after the shot? Callahan lifted by hand up and was pointing to it, telling me what it was and what it would feel like. I couldn't see anything then. Maybe it needed time to develop or something.

I can see it now. I dry off and get into bed still looking at it. Curled up looking at it and thinking to myself about the shot. How before the shot there was some crap in my head about Ma and her chatting about getting damp into her good pillows and always drying my hair. Thinking it's strange that I remember knowing that even though it's not really there anymore. Looking at it and thinking about the weight of a proper gun, rather than just the air rifle. Y'know, if you've never held one I can't describe it to you. Anyway I don't want to. This is mine.

People talk all the time about 'cold steel', but it doesn't stay cold. I found it took heat from me really quickly. Like it wanted held.

I watch the burns until they fade back into my skin again. I can still see them, though, a little bit. And then sleep starts to come in these incredible waves like a great heavenly hand is pulling the duvet up, tucking me in.

When I walked away from that stupid (working-man's) club last night, everything was so awful. It was confused and messy and I couldn't make top or tail of half of it. I would have never in a million years have told you peace like this was possible. And here we are, like, what? Twelve, thirteen hours later? Here we are and it's not only possible but it's happening.

My dreams are quiet and happy. I don't remember all that much when I wake up, except that there was a squirrel throwing acorns at me. The real world helps me realize why that happened; something keeps tapping at my window. I sit up just enough to hang on the ledge and look out. I'm at the back of the house, so I can see the yard, and down over the entry between us and the terrace in the next street. Then something strikes the glass right in front of my face. Not an acorn, but a tiny stone, but an acorn made more sense in the dream, I think. Tiny stones.

Conor's pitching them up out of the entry. Maybe he hasn't seen me. I ease myself back down beneath the ledge and wait. It's nothing to do with him. Conor's absolutely grand, I have no problem with Conor. And tomorrow, probably I'll really want to talk to him. But I don't want to talk to him now.

Conor, though, seems to want to talk to me. And I think he must know I'm up here, because he just keeps pelting the window over and over again. Without sitting up I put my fist up on the window ledge to give him the finger.

Count to one, two-

Another stone. So I sit up, look out the window and shrug at him, mouth, _What_?

He waves me down. I shake my head, but he waves again. Fucker's not going anywhere, is he? It's not fair. I just want to sleep. If he knew where I've been, what's happened to me since I saw him last, if he knew, he'd let me sleep. I make sure he sees me rubbing my eyes, make sure he knows how much of a fecking imposition this is, before I tap my wrist, hold up two fingers; _Two minutes_.

Now I have to drag myself out of bed again. Now I have to get dressed.

Normally, this is the part where I'd be thinking about what he might ask me and how I'll be able to get around it. I start trying to think through that, almost on instinct, like a trained dog. Then I realize I owe him no explanations and I'm not telling him anything anyway. It's not like I had to run out on him last night, now, is it? It's not as if I had to surgically detach myself from him to… Y'know what? Fuck it. Stupid double-talk and sarky shite, I'm done with all that. I don't owe him fuck all. That's all I really need to say there.

My sisters are having dinner, eating off the lap trays in front of the telly. Somebody must have died; they're watching the news. I walk down the hall and feel all the eyes look out of the living room and follow me past. Ma, on her own, is at the kitchen table. She's smoking inside now, using a saucer because she threw out all the ashtrays when she pretended to quit. This probably means something. I don't care enough to see it. She lifts her face up from her hand, but only so she can rub the hand over it, and through it she mumbles, "Conor's out there."

"Yeah, I saw him." He's waiting when I get out there, scuffing his heels on the wall next to the gate. I ask, in case this can all be avoided and I can go back to sleep, "What do you want?"

"What are you _talking_ about?" he says, like I'm the mad one, "Where did you _go_?"

Okay, so he doesn't want something easy I can answer and go back to bed. I step out and shut the gate behind me. "Surprised you noticed. Oh!" and I shove his shoulder, "That was the other thing I meant to tell you, I was trying to tell you last night only you were being an arse; Paddy Hegarty bought me a drink. How amazing is that?"

"Jim, for fuck's sake-"

"Tell me it's amazing, Conor, would you?"

"You vanished. I thought you copped off with Maria, but she was waiting for us at the gate again this morning and she says that never happened." Too fecking right. And he still hasn't told me it's amazing. If he'd only listen to me he'd realize I'm trying to offer him a happy distraction from awkward things I don't intend to answer. He says, "She asked me to give you this." It's a normal page off a file block, written on top to bottom and folded in two. The edges are sealed all over with tough plastic sticky tape. "The tape is so you'll know I didn't read it."

Maria Jameson is a plague and, like a plague, is to be carefully avoided.

I reach past him, lift up the lid of the wheelie bin and post Maria's note where it belongs.

"The fuck'd you do that for?" Conor says.

"Did you want something when you called me out here? I was sleeping. I was having a dream that made you into a squirrel."

"Are you high?"

Interesting question. But in the way he means, "No."

"Then what's the matter with-"

"With who?" I cut in with that before I really knew what I was saying. "With me? Is there something wrong with me? I hadn't noticed. Matter of fact I was going to ask you the same question. Granted, I was going to ask you tomorrow, yeah, sure, but since you're _so_ keen to talk, what's the matter with _you_, Conor? You're the one decided to ignore me the whole of last night."

He shrugs. Goes back to scuffing his heels. All the argument all gone out of him. People are so easy. "Yeah, well, you looked like you were having a good time anyway."

"That's not what I asked you."

"And you still haven't answered me either!"

"Does it matter where I went last night? I mean, does it really impact on you at all? _At all_?"

He breaks, snaps at me, "Do you know how pissed off I'll be if you turn out to be a loon and I end up stuck here!?"

Ah. See, there's always a selfish reason. Nobody cares about anything unless it's going to hurt them. Thinking about it, I pace a little bit, just back and forth, just across the entry. But it seems to unnerve him. I should remember this for another time. "You mean you wouldn't go on your own?"

Aw, look at him, all hurt and offended. Look at them big blue eyes. He'll fit right in in the States. Maybe I was hasty when I told him about Kate Merriweather booting with the other foot; what living woman could resist that big fecking dopey puppy-dog face. I'm going to strangle him. He looks all sad and pissed off and says, "I wouldn't want to."

"But _would_ you?" I insist. I want to know. I want him to answer this so I can rip him open for it.

"I… I don't know."

"That's weak," I tell him. "You think I'm going along to keep _you_ company?" All of a sudden he's not hurt and offended anymore. He's all pissed off. He takes a swing at me, but I duck it and he hits the wall instead. While he doubles up swearing, holding his damaged fist in against his chest, I put my hand on his shoulder. "Sorry. But I wasn't just letting you punch me, y'know?"

He looks up, the pain of it bringing tears to his eyes, and says again, "Where'd you go?"

Far, far away. I went to a place where intelligent people decide what happens to idiots. I don't think I believe in heaven anymore. Not the big glowing cloudy place anyway. And I don't think you have to die to go there. I think weak people just tell themselves that. Everything will be better if I just get this life business over and done with. I think heaven's a fable.

I went to a place where it all makes sense.

Like, where if somebody knows too much, the best thing to do isn't just to snuff him out and make it so he doesn't know anything anymore, because nobody learns anything off of that sort of shite. No, the best thing to do is to teach him that knowing stuff isn't the best plan. It's not the be-all and end-all. It's not all there is.

If Conor, for instance, had fired a gun at me rather than throwing a punch, and it had landed the way the punch did, by my ear, it would have blown out my eardrum by now. All I'd be hearing would be ringing, tinnitus. And there'd be blood, dark and full of thick clots, pumping out of it.

That's where I went.

I tell him, "I went for a walk, alright? Look, you're annoyed and I'm exhausted. Can we talk about this tomorrow?" He nods and grimaces, still clutching his scraped knuckles. "Are you alright? Do you want to come in and… well, there's a freezer, I don't know if there's actual take-out-and-use-it ice, but-"

"No. You're right. I'll go home. I'll see you tomorrow." I stand where I am until he's straightened up, until he's made some attempt to flex his fingers. Stand there and watch him walk away, until he reaches his own gate and he's gone. Don't like seeing him hurt. It's not like I meant for that to happen. He swung at me and I just got out of the way, y'know.

That's why I don't feel bad. I swear. This isn't like being dead or anything, isn't like being switched off. It's just because it was really the only sensible thing I could do, isn't it?

I go back inside. Ma's still at the kitchen table. She says, "How's he?"

I tell her, "He hurt himself, went to get seen to."

I think she maybe asks what happened, but then the girls, still gathered around in the living room, all make the same revolted noise all at once. The pitch is like a dog-whistle. It's the sound that attracts me. I go and lean in that doorway instead. They're still watching the news, so whatever they wanted to see mustn't have come on yet. Their disgust is over an item about a fella who was found in the early hours of this morning staggering around on the White Bridge down in Dublin proper. He'd been blinded, says the reporter, and had his tongue cut out. He'd been deafened too, and was in hospital now, delirious and totally unreachable, for the time being.

Looking at this, thinking to myself that probably wasn't the work of one person. There was probably one guy who had the original idea, and then made some token gesture to get it started. One of the ears, maybe. The left ear, for the sake of argument. And then after that, after that guy had shown the proof of his intentions, that he wasn't just talking vicious bollocks, others took over and completed the job.

I'm thinking, it's a bloody awful thing to have happened to somebody. Unless he'd done something for it. Unless he was a fucking idiot. Unless the people involved had some sort of important message to put out, and all they needed was that initial idea. I mean, if they were trying to send a message, no matter how awful or terrible or disgusting a thing is, you have to admit they succeeded in that. And isn't that what matters? If you accomplish the thing you set out to achieve, isn't that what matters, really?


	14. Five Days

Conor's hand is broken. It's something called an impact fracture. The knuckle of his middle finger hit the wall so hard the bone snapped halfway down his hand. He was in A&E for eight hours waiting to get seen to last night. Apparently Friday's a bad day to hurt yourself. The injuries start rolling in about half an hour after the offices close down for the weekend, apparently. He kept getting superseded by people in more danger. And then all they did was put a tight stiff dressing round it. You don't get a plaster on your hand, it seems. He can still work it and all, but it gives him pain.

"At least," I told him, "You'll not have to write out your exam answers with it."

That didn't help him much. He's more upset about Monday. Last hurley game of the season and he can't play. Paddy Hegarty's getting the cap.

"Do you want me to go and break his hand too?"

"Do you not think you've done enough?"

"I said I was sorry. Anyway, the offer stands."

It's probably not a good idea for us to be drinking. Aside from the fact it's the middle of the afternoon, and I think Conor's still recovering from Thursday night anyway, things are still a bit shaky. But we have to get rid of what's stashed at the shed. The building itself has to be passed on, yeah, but this stuff is ours. Hard won, stolen, fought for, scrimped and saved for. Leave this for whatever wanker Conor picked off the U-16 squad for his inheritance? The fuck we will…

The drinking is completely necessary. Therefore, there is absolutely no point in worrying about any possible consequences. One way or another, this is going to happen. We'll probably be okay once we start working through the remains of the grass we stole off Noel a couple of weeks ago.

For a while Conor listens for the gaelic results on the radio. Completely dominates the joint too, the leech, but then again he's in pain. I actually really should have asked what sort of painkillers he was already on but it's too late now, and anyway, he's starting to relax a bit.

Then there are no more sports results on the radio, and it's all just music. The sky outside the window starts to turn this really gorgeous orangey-red. All of a sudden it seems important to say it again and maybe properly mean it this time; "Conor, I'm really sorry I ducked. Well, no, I'm not, because you would have smashed my face open, but I'm sorry you hurt your hand because I ducked."

There's a long, long pause, during which I can hear my too-fast heartbeat in my ears, where my vision goes up and down with these little red swells round the outsides of my eyes and then he says, "I'm sorry I tried to smash your face open."

I calm, completely, in that second. Everything's fine again. Everything's warm and mellow and sort of wiggly at the edges, which is okay.

I tell him, "I'm going out to try and get another squirrel. Do you want to come and watch for park keepers?"

He thinks about it while I'm getting the air rifle ready. The air rifle doesn't really feel like much anymore. It feels like a toy, more than anything. But it'll do when I only want the tail. I actually really, _really_ want the tail, like, more than I ever did. Even the last time, when I really wanted it, I didn't want it like this. I'm not telling Conor any of that though, because he'll think I'm a psycho, and he'll ask me why, and I don't really know.

"Yeah okay," he says. I help him up and he switches off the radio. But it was in the middle of a song, so it's annoying me, and I keep sort of humming along. And then, the two of us walking along up the overgrown back of the park, fearless squirrel hunters, I'm humming and Conor starts in with the words. And it's like four seconds before you hear, "_So I'll start a revolution from my bed, 'cause you said the brains I had went to my head._" And there are early flowers strangling themselves with undergrowth to illustrate the next line By now we're getting sort of into it and it's all honest and true, the opposite of those stupid sheepy fuckers singing My Way the other night, "_Stand up beside the fireplace, take that look from off your face, you ain't ever gonna burn my heart out_!"

And then there's a chorus, but now I'm sort of thinking, "Shh, shh, Conor, shut up-" He's working his way through remembering the next verse and doesn't hear me. "Conor, shut up! We're probably scaring away any squirrels."

That floats around in his head for a minute. "No…" he says, slowly, "No, because do you never see those princess films your sisters used to watch? Because you're supposed to sing. You get deer and birds and everything coming when you sing."

"I don't think that works on proper animals, though, I think that's only cartoon ones."

"Oh. Right. Jim?"

"What?"

"Who the fuck is Sally?"

We wonder for a long, long time about who Sally could be, discussing it very quietly amongst ourselves. We end up sitting ready, waiting, by that tree where I last saw one of the bushy tailed feckers disappear.

"We won't look back in anger, will we?" Conor says to me. It sounds like he's smiling, but I'm not going to look. I've just spotted prey. He's munching something out on the end of a branch, all yum-yum and not even thinking of me. Which is good. I hope he's happy and he doesn't even know what hit him. Very slowly, looking at his back, I stand up and take aim.

Then there is good news and bad news. The bad news is, I didn't actually hit him. Maybe winged him. The good news is, he fell twelve feet or so down off his branch, so he's not going to run away before I get there. I pick him up and he's not dead either. Just lies there in my palm, breathing hard. His neck's not broken or anything, which surprises me. I think it's shock more than anything. "It's okay," I tell him. "You might actually be okay, okay? I only want your tail, so just don't get at me and you might still be okay."

"Are you talking to the squirrel?" Conor says over my shoulder.

"Do _you_ have a tail?"

"…No."

"Then yeah, I'm talking to the squirrel. C'mon. There's a knife back at the shed."

He's shaking, poor little bugger, so I carry him in the pocket of my jumper. The squirrel I mean, not Conor. He wouldn't fit. Conor carries the rifle in his good hand and I carry the furry prize back to the shed. This one is grey. My first squirrel I got was red. But they do that, don't they? The greys get in and force the red out and kill them and stuff. Really, I'm probably doing a service here. This is, like, a squirrel _war-criminal_ or something, so I'm doing the best thing for everybody. And it means his tail will look even better when I nail it up next to the other one.

Maybe I'll take it with me when we go. Like, lucky charm sort of thing? I know it's supposed to be really stupid to keep trophies, but it's never done me any harm with anything else I ever killed or anything, so…

Back at the shed, I put the shivering squirrel on the table-crate and get Conor to hold him down. Then I stretch his tail out long and pull all the hair out away from the base so it'll still look fluffy. The knife's not great. It's just a stupid thing we used to keep around before we got the air rifle. Really should probably do this with a cleaver, something that'll go through quick and clean. But it's sharp enough to do the trick.

Conor looks the other way and says, "Do you think Sally's somebody's girlfriend?"

"Nah, she sounds single in the song. Sister, maybe. But we can't just say that because loads of people have sisters called Sally, or people they've broken up with called Sally, so that still doesn't work." And yeah, that's all the time it takes, because by then the little tail is off, and the little animal is back out of shock and fighting again, struggling so that Conor can't hold him one handed and he takes off, oh, like a shot, you'd be so proud of him, like a sprinter towards the door. He never gets there, though. He collapses down off his fat little legs before he ever tastes fresh air.

"Aw, Jesus, get it out," Conor says, poking at it with the butt of the gun. I bat it away and pick him up again. See, he's still not dead yet. He's still breathing. Which is sort of incredible to me. I sit down against the wall and keep him with me, stroking the back of the steely head with the back of my finger. Death's such a weird thing, y'know? Like it can be slow and you can fight it, like this little fella? Or sometimes Death's fast, and strong, and it just jumps you and that's it, bang, goodnight, you're done…

"Conor, I have to tell you something. Like, if you and me are running out of here in like, five days, _Christ_, five days. I have to tell you something. Because you're the only person who I really care if you know the truth or not and you're the one person who never believed it and I just let you and I can't do that if we're getting away from here." I think I'm bringing him down, between dying squirrels and now suddenly telling stories. It just feels really, really important. "But you have to let me just tell it and finish it, okay? And really, really, please, don't walk out."

He nods and sits down.

It's really hard to talk to him. I talk down into the squirrel's beady eyes as they slowly, steadily start losing their sparks. "Y'know what everybody says happened in London and we always just laughed about it?"

"It's… It's like this. You remember when I got sent over there. Which wasn't fair, because I never did _anything _to Ma for her to pack me off like that. I heard her saying on the phone she couldn't cope. What had I _ever_ done to her, y'know? I always tried to just be quiet and do things right and not give her any reason and she never… But anyway, yeah, I went to live with Da in London. I was alright, though, it was sort of cool. First I'd ever been away from Dublin was that, so… What were we? Fourteen, fifteen? Yeah, somewhere in between. Everything felt cool then.

"But it turned out to be a poxy little flat, and a box room with a bed crushed into it. Turned out to be a new school, which wasn't like ours and nobody could understand my accent and they called me pikey because they thought I was one.

"Stop looking at me like that, Conor, I know I've told you this part before. But it's important.

"Because I never told you what Da did for a living, did I? Mythic distant father in the mythic distant metropolis and what did he do for a living? Well, every night at sunset, as all the clinics along Harley Street closed for the night – Harley Street's where all the posh doctors and that shite are – Da would drive along in a van, and go from back door to back door, collecting the sharps buckets.

"A sharps bucket is what they put anything sharp in when they're finished with it. Like blades and things they can't sterilize and reuse. And needles. Loads of needles. That's what my Da did for a living. He took the sharps away to be destroyed.

"So we get into week two of me getting called pikey, right? And there was this thing on the news about illegal Botox injections. Y'know that stuff that freezes your face, like singers and all get? News says that this stuff is actually lethal-poisonous, if it gets into you wrong. So… So don't ask what made me do it then. I probably knew at the time but I don't really remember what I was telling myself.

"But this one night, me and Da had a curry and he asked me about school and I told him nothing true and all that was normal. And then I told him I was going out this particular evening. I think I said swimming, but I might have made that up because of what comes after. I'm pretty sure I really did tell him I was going to the leisure centre. But I didn't. I just left the flat when he went to get ready for work. Went out and got in the back of his van. It was a mess anyway, like his flat was. That's how you could tell I didn't really live there anyway; my room was bare and tidy and the rest of the place was… But anyway, what I mean, I hid under this black plastic sheet in the back corner that had never ever moved and had nothing really under it.

"Da drove about collecting sharps buckets. Whenever he left them in the back I'd get up and look inside them. Over and over again, there was nothing. And then, finally, there was a bucket full of those needles like I'd seen on the telly. Me, I was thick, I wasn't even thinking they might be full of something else. Could have been a fecking methadone program or something. But it wasn't, y'know, it was that stuff, that Botox. Botox comes from 'botulinum toxin', did you know that? I bet none of them singers and all know that or they'd hardly do it. Not all of the needles were empty either. Most of them had some traces, little drops, but some of them were still half full. See, once they've stuck them in one face it's illegal for them to stick it in any other."

"I did that two more nights. I kept a box of the things under my bed. Don't ask me why. I don't know what I wanted them for, at that stage.

"No, that's a lie. I knew. Because of the name-calling. Because even the teachers were never really listening to me, just sort of squinting like it was my fault I didn't sound like them. I mean, over an accent? People really make you feel that shite over an accent? But it fecking mattered. Jesus, fourteen, Conor, of course it fecking mattered, everything mattered… I just kept thinking myself, just one of them. If I could get to just one of them, then they'd all shut up. I had this dream _all the time_, that I'd bring the box in in my schoolbag and spend a whole day just sneakily poisoning them all one-by-one. I had it in my head it would be instant and freaky. It's not, not with small doses anyway. You need something like strychnine for th-_Anyway_…

"But I was never going to _do_ anything with them, not really. I just felt better because I had them.

"And then I actually went swimming. I picked the wrong day for it. There were all kinds of kids from all over England. There was some big competition the next day. I don't even know what it was. There were just loads of really irritating competitive pricks who all seemed to know each other, like the under-fifteen swimming community was just this big nasty family, y'know?

"One of these was a _ginger_ irritating competitive prick who kept scratching his knees. They were all hard and pink. Flaky. Ankles too. One of these bastards that has the best of everything, really thinks he is something? He had amazing trainers, they were the same ones you got for your birthday that year. Not that I'm saying you're like that, I don't mean that. I mean he probably didn't have to wait for a birthday to get something like that, y'know?

"I swear, I never opened my mouth to him. I never looked at him. I was just putting my stuff in a locker and he started laughing. Fucking stupid fucking plastic fucking bag, Conor, it's such a ridiculous thing when I'm thinking about it, but that's what it was. He was laughing because I'd brought my stuff with me in a frigging Tesco bag.

"He was a big bastard too. You know me; even now I'm fucked in a fair fight. I wasn't going to do anything about it. I was walking away. But I _did_ mutter at him to, like, piss off or something? And that was enough. Says him, "_My daddy-_" and yeah, he was that kind of prick, "_My daddy says all the Irish are good for is driving vans and laying tarmac._" And well, that was that. You can imagine. That was that.

"These days we'd know it for what it was. Lanky ginger kid with fucked-up skin at a swimming pool; he was taking it out on me before anybody did it to him. We'd spot that in a second now. But back then… that was that.

"I kept an eye. Found out they were all coming back the next day. Saw him taking pills. Not hard ones, though, little caps, gel sort of things? They're called chlorphenamine. Antihistamines, like you take for hayfever, except they stop you scratching when you've got a skin condition. I only found that out, like, last year.

"So… look, do I really have to tell it? Like, word-for word? Jesus, Conor, stop staring at me…

"I went back the next day. That ginger fucker went out to do, I don't know, practice laps or something. I picked his locker open. Cheap shite, the lock was easy. I poured the pills out on the floor and stuck and every single one of them with leftover face-freezer. He came back before the races and took one and then he was in the pool and he died. That's all. I took-"

No. Conor doesn't need to know what I took. It wasn't a trophy thing, anyway, there was nothing sick about it. It just never occurred to me the bloody things wouldn't fit. Stupid lanky scabby bastard…

"I took my stuff and I took off. His name was Carl. I only found that out after. It was written in his shoes. I mean, nobody could prove anything, nobody really knew anything. Da still packed me back here, though. Ma just sort of sighed. Said, swear to God, I'll never forget it, she said, 'Well, his school uniform'll still fit him'. And then I was back here. Like I'd never left. I sort of feel like London beat me? Like maybe I should go and beat London someday…"

The squirrel's dead now. I get up and, from the doorway, throw him into the bushes. He'll be dinner to something, anyway. I turn back to the shed and Conor is holding the tail out to me. We've got no nails, but I tie it with old string next to the last, ratty tail.

Then he says to me, "Can I walk out _now_?"

"You can't tell anybody."

"Who would believe me? They all think it's true already." He looks away in the direction I threw the squirrel, with a face on him like he's going to cry. He says, "I'll see you after mass in the morning."

"Alright."

I wish I could tell you about the relief, about confessing? Like, that I could tell you I'm sorry I've put all that on Conor, but how much lighter I feel and all that shite? But there's no relief. Thing is, I'm not sure there was anything there to relieve.

* * *

[A/N -To all future readers who might be wondering about the shoelaces, like so many did, you can always message me.]


	15. Four Days

"Was all that true, yesterday?" I don't even have to say anything. In fact, it's better if I don't. Conor's been giving this a lot of thought, you can tell. It's all over his face, and I'm not being nasty or anything, but it's not a face that's used to thinking. It doesn't suit him. It makes him look ill and sad. He's running over all the facts of the case in his head, one more time. What I did and why I told him and when I told him, those are the big ones. I already know what he's going to say, though. If he'd come to the wrong decision he would have walked right past me in the hallway of Sacred Virgin, left me to stand there while everybody filed out until I was alone with the saints and martyrs. Saint Anastacia, with her tongue and teeth pulled out. Saint Lucy, with her eyes on a plate. Jesus above the door, pointing through the hole in his chest to his burning heart.

Wonder how long you'd have to leave a heart drying out before it would burn for real? I said that once, y'know, in an R.E. class. Simpering twat at the top of class, she looked down at me with this sort-of sickened half-smile on her face. Looking at me as if to say, 'Bless him' and 'God, they're all so young'. She said, "I think you're taking that a bit literally, James."

Yeah, obviously. Hence the qualifying 'for real' on the end of it? But then again, in my experience, R.E. teachers are just those who are too thick and boring and dogmatic to teach arts, so maybe she hadn't studying any English in a while.

Conor's still considering, by the way, or he thinks he is. Like I was saying, if he'd made the wrong decision already he would have stormed by and never spoken to me again. Come Wednesday, he would have gone off on his own. It all would have destroyed him a bit. And yeah, I would have been annoyed, yeah I would miss him but… I wouldn't have stopped him. Wouldn't have been miserable about it.

He hasn't really got a choice. He as good as told me so the other night. He wouldn't want to go without me, it would be a lot more difficult for him, remember? Conor has to protect his own interests. There's no decision for him to make, but I'll let him come to that in his own time.

Anyway, we'll come back to him after he thinks he's made up his own mind. This is difficult for him, and I appreciate that. Somebody like me, there would have been nothing to forgive and I would have told him years ago and we would always have had a laugh over it. It's not his fault he's never been laughed at in his life. He doesn't know what that does to you. And I bet he sat in mass today, all through the gospel and the sermon, bored out of his mind because he just didn't get it.

You need a good strong history of petty humiliation to feel anything for the story of Cain and Abel. Most people, you say the names and they'll spit, like a triggered robot, like a dog slobbering because the bell's rung, _Killed His Brother_. Brainwashed. Cain killed his brother. Boo, bad Cain, fuck off, into the land of Nod in the East of Eden, there to wander forever, bearing a mark that all may know thee and punish thee, yay, until the end of thy days…

Or something like that.

People miss the whole first part of that story. Motive. Motive is everything. People are worse than coppers sometimes. Abel brings a sheaf of wheat before God, right? And God heaps all the praises on him, all the biscuits Abel can eat. Cain brings a sheaf of wheat before God. God tells him where he can stuff it. Did you know that? Because that's the real story here. That's the most important part and that's the part that so many people don't know. And Cain gives God his chance, like, he asks him why and wherefore and to justify himself and God won't. So, there's two people involved here, and one of them's an all-powerful deity with no physical form who lives in the sky, so Cain went for the person he could actually lay hands on.

And _then_ he gets bucked out to go wandering and get punished yay-until-the-end-of-his-days, alright? Just try and bear the rest of the fucking story in mind, please. Because I feel like the rest of that story really changes how you perceive it, y'know?

"Alright," says Conor, and I'm almost not even ready for him

"Hm?"

"Alright. But you never should have told me. And I never want to hear about it again."

I could have told him yesterday he'd say all that. I could tell him now that, though he's standing there questioning the wisdom of what he's saying, asking himself if things can ever really be good again, in a couple of days he'll start forgetting about it. Just for a couple of hours at a time, just when I've been out of the way, but that's the start. And then, when we take off, everything between us will be like it's always bit and he'll start and forget for real. After that, it won't be long. He'll be okay. I was, anyway.

"Understood. So what are we doing?"

"Going up to put the lock on the shed."

Oh yeah. That's what we were meant to do yesterday. And the fact that it didn't get done is nothing to do with me getting all honest and stuff. That was just because we were already messed up by then. "Don't forget and take Noel's gun out first."

"Nah, he says we can leave it."

"Well, why was he always giving us such a hard time about it?"

Conor shrugs, "'Cause he could, I suppose."

What a fucking irritation. All the shite we took off him these couple of years… But it's not a thought that distracts me very long; this is such a weird walk, y'know?

Like, I know it's not the last time we'll walk along the fronts of the houses. It's not the last time Conor will give me a boost over the gate on the end of the entry. I go to the yard behind the Clearys' and there's a brand new bike lock with a combination lying in behind the bin. I pass it through the gate to him and climb back over. It probably won't be the last time for any of this. But it's still a weird walk.

Probably be the last time we cut up through the park. Definitely be the last time we go over the wall into the rough back there, the long grass full of junkie stashes and everything else that happened last night. The first and last time we've ever put a lock on the shed, and me writing the combination on the side of my hand so it can be passed on. It's weird. It's not nice, actually. And I can't help it, but last night comes back to me and I start humming _Don't Look Back In Anger_, until I see Conor glaring at me because apparently that counts as mentioning that thing we said we wouldn't mention again.

He wants to get over that. We'll never be able to switch a radio on again either if he bloody doesn't.

Conor, with a smile like a peace offering says, "Are you coming to ours for dinner?"

"'Preciate it, mate, but I should probably go home. It's just… probably the last one."

"Oh. Yeah, you're right."

Of course, neither of us is actually moving at all. Just looking at that stupid bike lock like it's going to grow a face and tell us when to go. And as we stand there, I start to hate the shed as much as everything else around here. While we were stuck here, it was somewhere to hide. It was friendly. But not anymore. And the more I look at it now the stupider it looks, childish, daft fecking stupid clubhouse shite… I'm the first one to turn around, nudge Conor to bring him with me. "C'mon. This is depressing me."

"Right again," he sighs, falls into step. On the other side of the wall, where the grass is clipped down and the paths are all hosed down, where we're both breathing again, he says, "Listen, I'm going to go and see our Noel, alright?"

"Yeah." I get it. Loose ends. So I walk down to the bus stop with him and wait until one comes. Bloody Sunday service, so it kills the better part of an hour. And yeah, we're talking to each other, everything's fine, but it gives me time to think as well. About loose ends. That's a really good idea he's had there, about tying up loose ends.

The ones I'm thinking of aren't really so important as saying goodbye to a brother. After all, I live with my sisters. I'll be seeing them right up until the end. But that doesn't change the fact that there are things that need taken care of. So once I've packed Conor off to be honourable, I set about following suit. Like a gentleman, remember?

The first thing I do is go back to our street, to the pub around the corner.

All the auld lads are smoking in the sun around the door. Thinking they're funny, having their laugh, Mr Loughry calls out, "Here, don't let him in, he's only a wee tote!"

And they all get started. Only a second late, I realize this works best if I play along with it, if I laugh and smile back at them and swear blind I'm not trying to get served. "Honest to God, I only want a word with Paddy about the hurley game tomorrow, swear, that's all. Sure my birthday's Wednesday anyway, why would I try and cheat you by, like, three days?"

Four if you count today, but it doesn't do to be too specific. They'd think I'd planned this somehow, was manipulating their reactions of all things. I wouldn't get that fiver shoved in my pocket by Josie Niall, saying that's for my first pint on Wednesday. Wouldn't get to slip inside while they're all crowing at him and calling him soft. Thinking to myself, that's bus fare, and this might be turning into a better day than it started as.

I knew I'd find Paddy Hegarty here. There's a thousand and two Hegartys and one of them's the barman, so they're always palling about in here on a Sunday after mass. It's just tradition, and the people round here really do go in for their traditions. If I hadn't found him, I'd have found somebody who knew where he was. But Paddy's sitting right there, between cousins of his, I think. He doesn't even see me coming until I tap him on the shoulder.

He stands up and comes with me out of the way. I'm glad. If the rest of them heard him say my name and they knew who I was… There's a load of them and they're all built like Paddy is, know what I mean? Obviously this is a public place and it's a Sunday and all, but I've still got four days to live through.

"Listen," I start, "I never got talking to you the other night. I got that drink. I appreciate the gesture."

It embarrasses him, talking about this. It's not the done thing; it's supposed to be a thing which is done, and then everything just resets. But I need to say that, it's my only opener. So he has to find a way to embarrass me right back. He says, "Yeah, what did Maria say to you?"

Oh yeah, the spit-take… That had all faded a bit. I try and laugh along, for the sake of what's going on here. "...Don't even ask. By the way, do you know where to find her on the weekend?"

"On a Sunday? Recovering from Saturday, usually."

Home. She told me her address the other night so I could tell the taxi place on the phone. Sorted. "Okay, thanks. Oh, but Paddy, there was one other thing."

"What?" It's amazing, how quickly he's changed; that was quite an open question, very happy-to-help sort of a question. Good.

I tell him, "See if you play as Captain in that hurley match tomorrow? I mean, by all means _play_, but see if you play as Captain? There's no measure for how much you'll regret it. And I don't mean violence. I mean I'll make what you promise junkies look like sunshine and fecking rainbows."

Voice low, below the notice of his subhuman clan, he says, "Is that a threat?"

I tell him, "Yeah. I'm sorry to have to do it, when we were getting along so well. But yeah, it is. Believe it or don't, but…" But I leave the rest to him. Shrug and pat him on the shoulder like we're friends, like I only came here to make sure everything was all straightened out, the way it started. And then I turn and leave, stopping to tell the auld lads in the doorway, all bright and breezy and all, "See? Completely sober, wasn't in there two minutes," and to hear them laugh me along on my way.

A little charm gets you further than I ever realized before now.

Not turning out to be a bad day all round, is it? So now I have to go for a little walk. Not very far at all, only five minutes or so. And yet, it's a very different sort of street I find myself on. All the houses have grassy front gardens, little red brick walls all around them. Some of the lawns have flower beds on them, or bushes. Some have little fountains and that kind of thing. One of them is covered in rough-looking little scotty dogs in different poses, all cast out of concrete. Some of them are just plain.

One of them has this stunted cherry tree dropping pale pink petals everywhere. The lawn is blanketed, and they're blowing into the street outside. Looking up the drive to the number on the door, it's the house I'm looking for. I walk up and ring the bell, but there's no answer. No car in the driveway either. In fact, most of the driveways on the street are empty. Everybody gone to mass or gone visiting for the afternoon.

Nobody about, then, to see me edge round the house to the back. The back garden is just as big, half-patio with a big gas barbecue under a cover. At the edge of the patio is a little river of gravel with green plants spotted through it. I take up a handful of the little stones and look up at the back of the house.

There's one window with a lilac voile curtain over it, and a wreck of alcopop bottles and feg packets and ashtrays along the ledge.

Me thinking, Bingo.

I throw stones at two second intervals. It takes less than a minute for Maria's wrecked blond head to appear, throwing the voile behind her to see out. But she sees me and the bleary eyes go wide. She gives the old signal, _Two minutes_, and disappears again. I wait. I'm okay to wait. Not in any hurry at all. And I have the memory of that bright, excited way she woke up to amuse me. I don't' know what she thinks she wrote in that little note of hers, but she clearly feels like it's done the trick.

It's more like five minutes, though, before she comes down and opens the back door. She's tried to cover her hangover a little, but the make-up is hasty and isn't doing the job. It took her that long to try it anyway, to dress and brush her hair.

"Suffering?" I say, as she lets me in.

She holds up thumb and forefinger, barely parted, "Little bit. Don't worry, though-" I wasn't worried. "-I'm really glad you're here."

"Really?"

I don't think she catches the tone of my voice, because she just nods, dead honest and says, "Really." Lights her first cigarette of the morning. I think it does something to steady her. "I mean, I tried to explain and I just… I just had to hope you believed me." She's assuming I read what she sent. That's okay. Let her. "Not that you shouldn't, I mean, it _is_ the truth. But if you were really really still offended you might not have thought so. I swear, I meant every word. Once we got talking the other day, I just really…"

She doesn't know how to finish that. Or maybe it would embarrass her. That's turning into a theme, today.

What she settles for instead is, "I just wanted to make sure you knew, anyway."

"Yeah, well, I just wanted to make sure you knew as well, Maria." She starts to smile, shakes her head. She doesn't get it. She's taking an apple out of the bowl on the table, actually offering me one, but I turn it down. She's not getting it. "Well, you do realize, don't you? This won't all go away when you go off to uni or wherever. I just felt sorry for you, I felt like you needed to know this and you were pretending it wasn't real."

"What are you talking about?" But the smile on her face is shaking now, and it's not just the alcohol working out of her system. She knows, she _must_ know, from how I said it, the last thing I could ever do is feel sorry for her. How could I _pity_ Maria Jameson?

"This. All of it. What you've done. Not to me, don't be ridiculous, but to yourself. This will never go away from you. Maybe you'll go to uni and pretend you're a good girl, and that's fine. Maybe you'll be a doctor someday and running around a hospital and that's fine. Maybe you'll get married and have kids. But this doesn't disappear. It'll always be there. You were a slag in school and you're always going to know that. I just felt sorry for you trying to pretend that won't happen. It's not a city or anything easy like that; it's not something you walk away from. It's _in_ you. Like everybody else has been, funny eno-"

"Get out," she says, before I'm even finished. She bites the words off, but there's no real anger in her. She's terrified. I can hear it, like screaming. And it's not the sound of somebody who's been stabbed either, it's the sound of somebody who's seen the knife and knows it's coming.

I raise my empty hands, to remind her I'm not armed, that I didn't come here with any intention to attack. "I just wanted to make sure you understood that. Because the only way you could make your future _worse_ for yourself is if you try and ignore it. It's just what you are, Maria. Learn and live with it, if you want my advice."

Suddenly screaming, hurling the rest of the apple at me, "Get the fuck out!"

"Okay." I go. I never came here to trespass, certainly. If she's telling me to go then I'm gone.

Depending on what Paddy Hegarty decides to do tomorrow, loose ends turned out to be easy enough. I definitely feel better than I did at the shed. Hungry too. It's time for me to be getting home anyway. Sunday dinner with all of them, remember? Roast beef, too. Too fecking right, this is a _way_ better day than I thought it would be during all the Cain-and-Abel talk.


	16. Three Days

There was no point in me going to school today. Conor went. Thinks he's just going to support the hurley team. Thinks he's going to show Paddy he's the bigger man. I hope he's pleased when Paddy pretends he's doing the same thing. He'll have to; no surer way to make himself look like a twat than to mention my name so he'll have to pretend this is something he's doing all by himself. I bet it'll feel good, y'know. He'll realize what being a good person is all about. He'll hate me for it. But I don't need the petty satisfaction of going along to see that.

And there's no point going in just to see the look on Maria's face either. She won't be there. She'll either be playing sick or playing hooky, like me. That's not just what I think, that's fact. I wonder how long she was crying for yesterday.

Tomorrow will be time enough to pack a bag. Today, I've got one more lose end. I was going to ignore it. It won't matter anyway. But I thought about it and I don't want anybody calling for me at the house after I'm gone. Just on the off-chance that Ma takes it hard, y'know. Well, probably not her. Cathy, maybe. Cathy might be upset. Anyway, while there's a chance of anybody missing me, I don't want to punish them. So I'm off to visit Callahan, one last time.

I find him at the office, the same place I found him first. Bernie's at the door. I think he's warmed up to me a bit, since Thursday night. See, when you prove yourself to people, that's when you have a real lasting effect. Whether you prove to them you're not to be messed with or just that you're not messing about, that's the only time things stick with them. You make them think about you, and then you're starting to affect their life. Bernie says, "Where've you been, lad? He was thinking you'd lost your balls after that last one."

Just simple, just truth, I tell him, "No."

"He'll be happy to hear it. He's on the phone, though." He's making me wait. That's what's in his head anyway. And then he looks me in the eye and sees no danger of any kind. Not to him, anyway. Opens the door at his back, "Just be quiet going in."

I'm on my way, and then hesitate. "He hasn't the girl in here, has he?"

"She's got lectures 'til lunchtime, you're all clear."

Callahan's in that chair of his again. High backed and with wings like it belongs in the library of some smoky manor house. He sees me come in, lifts his eyes at the seat opposite him. I take it. But he's not finished on the phone yet, and he turns his chair around. I can still hear every word, but it's just the fact that we can't see each other. The illusion of privacy, nobody having to look at anybody else, nobody feeling like they're imposing. It's good, I should remember it.

He's talking about one of his clubs and about an armoured car. I've missed all the important stuff, but I'm presuming one gets knocked over and the other washes the money. That seems sort of like common sense. Whatever; nothing to do with me anyway.

He finishes up and turns back to hang up the phone. "James, son!" and Bernie was right, he really is happy to see me now the business is dispensed with, "What became of you?"

"Nothing," I tell him. Almost a shame to lie so blatantly to somebody who's done all he can for me, but there it is. "Weird weekend, that's all." Well, you can't argue with that…

"Ah, now, see? They all said we'd scared you off but-"

"Take a bit more than that."

"I knew that." Then, shouting to be heard in the hallway, "Bernie never believed me." He waits, smiling, for a response. And when there isn't one he shakes his head. "I don't know if he's deaf or I can just never get a rise out of him. Shite state of affairs."

See, this is the thing about Callahan, and all the people I've met around him so far; they all strike me as so normal. I was in the car with two of them on Thursday night, for, like, ten minutes _max_, and I swear to God I've never heard so many bad-nun jokes in my life. They're just like the das down the pub. Most of them _are_ das from down the pub. It's not like they make it look on TV. I find it so hard to be afraid of them. Even when they do their worst, they do it with grace, without any personality in it. I just understand this so much more than the idea of a desk in a cubicle. I don't know that that's necessarily wrong.

But anyway, Callahan gets over Bernie's indifference and sits back, looks over at me. "Have you come to ask for a job yet?"

He keeps asking me that. Every time we've met. It's like none of this counts, and he doesn't mind all these little trials and tasters, but he's going to keep asking me that.

Which just makes what brought me here all the more difficult. "I have to tell you something. Should've done that first time I was here." His face turns serious, but he's not worried. He knows I'm not going to tell him my da's a cop or anything. He doesn't rip the piss either, just lets me go on. "I'm leaving. Wednesday."

"Jesus, he's not even in and he's booking his holidays-"

"No, I mean-"

"I know what you mean. But you're not out of school yet, are you?"

"I've my qualifications. I'll be eighteen, so… So I'm going." There. That's it said. It was not difficult. I didn't think it would be, and I didn't think he'd give me a hard time about it. It's out now and he knows now. All absolutely fine.

I hope I'm not flattering myself, because I don't like to think I'm that kind of person, but he looks almost… like, disappointed? He _says_, though, with a nod, "Well, it's a big wide world out there. But tell me this, have you a plan? Like, beyond just 'going', I mean. Have you anything _concrete_, son?"

So I tell him the plan. Conor and Belfast and the uncle, the money and moving on and setting-up and America by Christmas. Telling it to him it sounds very different than talking about it with Conor. But I get to the end and again, he doesn't take the mick or anything. He nods again and says, "Well, if you've someone you trust and trusts you along, that's the main thing. America, eh?"

"Yeah. We've been talking about it for years."

One more time, with absolute understanding, "Aye, you could do worse. Could do worse… Spent a bit of time there myself, not that much older than you are."

And here I go again, me and my mouth I'm not always in total control of, another question I should probably really just live with the mystery but… "But you came back?"

"Do you know the difference between Dublin and New York City?" I shake my head; would have thought that was obvious, seeing I haven't been there yet. "Six hours and fucking annoying accents. But that was my experience. I was walking into a family business and all. It'll be different, if you're making your own way."

Jesus, he's really trying to sound like he means that too.

But it's still just his opinion. There is _no_ reason I should think what met him is what's waiting for me, even if he does. No reason whatsoever. There's no reason for me to doubt the plan that's always been in place because of something Mickey Callahan said. I only came here to tell him I won't be back. But I feel like he can see me thinking all this. He leans back in his chair and lifts up his two hands, "Nah, nah, now, don't be listening to a bitter old bastard like me. I'm glad for you. You've your head screwed on your two eyes open. I've no doubt whatever comes to you you'll make the best of."

"And whatever doesn't come to me I'll take."

That makes him laugh. Not in a nasty way. He believes it. I honestly believe that he believes it. Nobody ever has, not really. Nobody ever thinks I mean the things I say sometimes. This is what happens when you prove yourself, see? They start to respect you, take you seriously.

Callahan opens the cupboard in the side of his desk, brings out two tumblers and the good whiskey. "It's early," I start saying.

"It's still closing time in Los Angeles. And what if I never see you again, son?" I've got no say in this. He pours out two measures and I'm obliged. "To the New World," is how he puts it.

It's not that New these days, though. And what he said, and things I've thought about before, I wonder what's new about anywhere. Six hours and the accents. What's does 'new' even mean anymore?

But there's no reason for me to doubt it. I never thought the streets over there are paved with gold or anything. That's somebody else's dream, my dream was just 'not-Dublin' and it definitely fulfils that brief. So early or not, I take up the measure and try and not look like a kid in front of him.

"You're a loss to me, y'know that? But I appreciate you coming and telling me."

"And I appreciate everything you've done for me." That's when I start and stand up. "And the drink, as well."

Callahan puts a hand out. He's the only one who's ever really shaken my hand over anything. Like gentlemen. And then he follows me to the door with his hand between my shoulders like… I don't know, like an uncle or something. Along the way, I feel something heavy slip into my jacket pocket. He thought I wouldn't notice. I reach for it and I know what it is from touch, before I even see it. Money. More than I've ever seen in one place before. A grand roll.

"No-"

"Don't argue with me."

"I can't take this."

"You'll need funds more than you're thinking, especially at the start. Now, if you'd hung about, I would've seen you right and you're not hanging about and I'm doing what I can. It's nothing to me. Don't argue with me and don't insult me."

"That's not what I came here for," I tell him.

He grins. "Never said it was." He reaches past me and opens the door. "If you ever find yourself back in the country, call round. I'll be where I am. Not that you'll be back, at all. That's not what I'm saying."

Bernie, mumbling through a cigarette, says, "Did I miss something?"

"We're losing this one," Callahan fills in for me. "He's off exploring."

Bernie too says, "Pity."

Something feels really funny about walking away from them. And it's not the money in my pocket either. There's just something weird and uncomfortable and… who else am I a loss to? Who else'll be sad to see me go, or think it's a pity? I'm not just talking about _now_ in my life either, I'm talking about ever. Who's going to… to _miss_ me? Yeah, of course, Ma and the girls' will have to deal with it, but what do I do for them? How am I part of their life? I'm just extra. Stapled on. And I'll be removed and when they forget me all I am is stories.

But who else in all my life has ever had plans for me and believed in me and been understanding of me and thought I had some sort of talent or skill and…

What am I walking away from? Dublin, yes, boredom, yes, the home I was raised in, yes, but what else am I walking away from, now?

Don't get me wrong; the plan is the plan has always been the plan will forever be the plan. Wednesday, as soon as Tuesday midnight ticks over into Wednesday and nobody can make me go back, which is thirty-eight hours away, we're still out of here. I just never realized how much harder it would be, having something to leave behind.


	17. Two Days

Oh God, this is too frigging weird.

I'm looking into my wardrobe, right? Which is just this tiny little cupboard in the corner and there was never very much in it anyway, but… But it just looks so _empty_. Only my jacket is still hanging up on the bar. On the floor are two boxes and my old P.E. bag. There's nothing much in the boxes. CDs and stuff, books, pair of trainers… nothing much. Just those two boxes and a note taped over the top of them; _I'll send for this stuff_.

And the bag is what's coming with me. That's all. That's what's weird. It's not a big bag, y'know. Something about it just feels really stupid; like, we're getting away from here so we can do better for ourselves, right? So that we can have more? Why, then, does this look like so very little to leave with?

Still, there's all that money in my jacket. Unless Ma decides to send the girls off on holiday while she stages another fecking intervention. I've decided I'm not telling Conor about that. Not because I don't trust him. I just don't want it to be a _thing_. If there's something urgent or we're in trouble over something, I want it to be there. I'll hide it in the bag on my way out but for now it can stay in the pocket. Easier to protect from the aforementioned mother. It's not that I mind her borrowing. She's always telling me how much I cost her while I'm breathing. But there'd be questions, wouldn't there?

I don't want questions today. I thought that would be alright. Thought that wasn't too much to ask for, y'know? That here at the end when all the decisions are so-long-made there might just be this one quiet, easy, inevitable day.

There isn't. There's been no peace since yesterday morning, since the last time I saw Callahan. All yesterday that money was glowing in my pocket like hot lead. Not scared of losing it or having it taken; it was never really mine, what would I be losing? No, just because… Just because. I thought about _throwing_ it away for a stupid minute, down by the river, but that was, like I say, stupid.

Saw that drunk fella again, down there. The one that was going to get in a fight with a swan, remember? He must be homeless; wearing exactly the same clothes as he was nearly two weeks ago. Which is no big deal, seeing the same guy twice if the guy sleeps in the doorways of the area, it's no big deal and it's not like it really stuck with me or anything… I just kept thinking of all those people who had watched him that night, the way they gathered round. I remember, in particular, one girl in tall strappy heels taking photographs. Thinking that wasn't what she'd brought her camera out for. She took that to take pictures of her drunk mates, of herself and her nearest all crushed up into one frame with their faces squished and… And I couldn't decide which of those photographs I would find more disgusting.

Let's think, what else has happened in between…

Oh, me and Paddy found a middle ground. You could call it that, I suppose. He played the match, but he made this big point of handing the Captain's armband to Conor on the bench before it all got started. And he had enough of a brain to swear blind I had nothing to do with it. Conor, strange to say it, went along with it. Said to me he couldn't really believe it. Said, "It's like you _bait_ decent into him." But I'm having none of that talk. I let him get as far as telling me it's a talent to be able to do that and then I stopped him.

But really, what I honestly feel? I feel like about an hour ago I was at Callahan's office and now I'm standing at my open wardrobe. And in an hour's time I'll be looking at Dublin from outside. Probably.

There's not even anything else to get done. I came home out of school this afternoon because Ma's gone to have her hair done and I knew she wouldn't be here. She goes every two weeks, but she does it in secret, otherwise Caoimhe gets offended.

I want to go somewhere I won't know things like that. I want to have to learn somewhere new every day. It's that sort of petty, stupid routine that's made me… I don't know, the term other people keep using is 'fucked up'. You know that old joke? First time somebody calls you a bastard, you punch him. Fifth time somebody calls you a bastard you have to ask your da a couple of questions. The longer it goes on the more you have to pay attention to it. And I know it's wrong to blame these people who've never hurt me, but they've never done anything for me either. Kept me, yes, but for _me_, for everything that's always been _in_ me and I couldn't do anything about it… Nobody's ever…

I'm thinking too much. And I don't feel nerves, so this is probably just nerves.

Trying to leave the room tidy, so nobody will have any excuse to go through it, I put the pages on my desk into the drawer. But one of them turns over and I know what it is, I know on sight, because there's a load of fourteens scrawled on the back of the page and on the front it says, 'Because otherwise Frankenstein had got away with it.'

It's only the rough notes from my essay. I dump those. But it makes me remember the finished item lying in my schoolbag downstairs. And despite having bunked off and gotten changed and all, it turns into this really important thing, all of a sudden. My three thousand words for-and-against the Creature's revenge. Mostly for. It's just this huge bleeding wound that needs stitched before anything else can ever happen again.

I get it and walk out of the house as I am, but I'm not feeling the breeze. Not feeling anything. It's something like a _minute_ before I'm walking back through the school gates, just as the last of everybody is leaving, but this is important, and I walk right to the door of the teachers' office at the end of the English rooms and knock.

Martinson is alright. If there was a teacher to take the opportunity and say goodbye too, it'd be him. Marty. He never minded us calling me Marty.

He opens the door to me and says, before I can speak, "Where'd you go this afternoon?"

"Home sick, sir. But I forgot this."

I hold the essay out to him and he takes it. And then, rather than just say yeah-sure-whatever and let me go, he says, "It would have kept til tomorrow, y'know."

No it wouldn't.

"I'll see you later, sir."

I won't.

Something's not right. This time, walking home again, I'm cold. As I walk away from it I'm thinking about that essay and slowly starting to hate it. Because I got so into it. I was so trapped, wasn't I? All those stupid ideas about nemesis and retribution, about the righteousness of a rejected creation? That's all blind, stupid, childish lies.

You want the truth?

The Creature came back to avenge itself because Shelley wanted it to. Because it would have been to a fucking short book if he didn't.

And now there's a question, like I didn't want there to be. Because if the truth is so simple and concrete, then anything you add onto that is necessarily coming out of your own head. So why, then, was my head full of nemesis and retribution and the righteousness of a rejected creation? Why couldn't I stop writing about how Frankenstein can't be allowed to get away with it? Why did I try and force him to take responsibility for what he'd done? What would ever have put those sorts of thoughts into my head?

Why can't I breathe right?

Between school and home I turn through the park gate, just for a second, just to find a bench and sit down for a minute. Something's really fucking wrong and I'm not giving it words. Everything was fine and it all made so much sense and now…

And now there's a scream. A woman screaming. It takes me a long time to even look up. Just can't… Can't get into it, y'know? She's screaming, "_Help_!" and "Stop that bastard!"

Even when I look up, I'm not really looking for her. I'm looking for something that shouldn't be happening. Life isn't like this. It doesn't just constantly repeat itself over and over again like a stuck fecking record, going and going until it wears itself out and it doesn't even make a fucking sound anymore and just keeps turning and turning the same way forever, it _doesn't_, it can't, or everybody'd just top themselves, it can't be like that and yet…

And yet…

There's a figure booting it away up the hill. He is twig thin. Wearing a cheap tracksuit and worn out trainers. He's carrying a handbag. There's a big fat woman trying to run after him and not doing very well at it. And the fella is limping.

A bony finger taps me on the shoulder. There's this awful, mad second I'm sure I'll turn around and see the devil himself. It's not. It's an elderly man. Very tall, very fine, well-dressed. Brown suit, and leaning on a navy blue golf umbrella. There's actually a watch chain crossing his waistcoat. This is who tapped my shoulder. Looks me in the eye, judgemental and benevolent all at once and points away up the hill. "Now why," he says to me, "wouldn't you run and help? Would that not be the thing to do?"

I look back to where it's all happening. It's all happened before. There was this one time when it went a bit differently, but nobody really enjoyed it. The fat woman didn't really know what to make of it and it ruined the moment for all involved. "You'd think that," I say, after careful consideration, "But there's a certain way it has to end."

Because the world has to just keep going round and round. Because it's a fucking short book if it doesn't.

"I'm sorry," I tell the old man, "I'm sorry I can't tell you something that'll give you back your faith in humanity or whatever."

He admits, "At your age I wouldn't have run either. We'd have been laughing, watching a wobbly big girl like that run. I was only asking."

Which makes me laugh, but there's no sound in it and no feeling I'm happy about feeling. The old man walks off, swinging his umbrella like a Brit, and I watch him go.

Something's really, really wrong here. Can you not see it? I mean, I look about me and nobody else is seeing it, they couldn't be, but… I can't be this mad. I wouldn't be aware of it, if I was going this mad. I'd just go there and be crazy and content, I wouldn't be aware of this whole awful spiral. No, this has to just be nerves. In a matter of minutes (the way time's flying lately) I'll be on a bus in a matter of minutes. And when I wake up into the bright clear Wednesday, I'll be in Belfast. That's all there is to it.

Why doesn't that thought leave me all calm, the way it's been doing for years? It's the only thing I want in the world and it's close, it should be _helping_. It's the only thing I want in the world. Away from here. It's the only thing I want in the world. Not-Dublin. It's not much to ask for. In fact, it's practically here. This is just nerves. This is just nerves. Now who's the stuck record? This is just nerves.


	18. Day One

Okay, so we're not quite onto the brand new day just yet, it's only ten to midnight, but it hardly makes a difference. We'll get there. We'll make it to midnight.

Count down with me; five o'clock, dinner with Ma and sisters. Clueless Cathy asks if I want anything special made tomorrow night, which is nice of her, but sickens me. I tell her not to go to any trouble. Then, because she looks hurt, I add that it'll only be stomach lining. Ma warns, "You'll not be going mad," like she'll still have any control. It's easy to pretend she's funny though, it was easy to laugh, because _she_ means 'mad' as in 'to excess' and I don't hear it that way, at first.

Six o'clock, sent to put the bins out for collection in the morning. Conor sneaks up on me in the entry and jumps up, pushing down on my shoulders, wrecking his hand all over again, but doesn't care. He's saying, "_Six fecking hours_," soft so as not to give it all away, still barely restrained. He takes one look at me and says, "What's the matter with you?" Lied; told him Ma had bought a cake already and I felt bad about it. Him, not in full control of himself anymore, "Get it. We'll go through it on the bus."

Seven o'clock, get bored, sit on front step for a bit. See same elderly man as in the park walking down the street. Never before and then twice in one day; he must have moved in somewhere around here. Remember I thought he was the devil when he tapped me, but that's not an explanation. Wave to him. He waves back, sort-of smiling. Ma sees, says, "Who's that?" I tell her just some auld lad I talked to before. Her, like I'm eight and not eighteen, curls up her lip and looks dead wary and says, "You have to be careful." Didn't really know what she meant.

Eight o'clock, get a wash and a shave, try and look ready for a brave new world. Figure out there's more to it than just looking, and anything I'm ready for I've been ready for a while now.

Nine o'clock, sit around in front of the telly with the rest of them. This is traditional; any event, birthdays, Christmas, them going on holiday without me, I have to join the family the night before. It's not excruciating like it has been in the past. Niamh and Caoimhe argue about shampoo ads. Mena stitches a new button on an old blouse. They fill up the three piece suite crushed in the tiny living room, so I sit on a cushion tucked up against the radiator. It's not excruciating.

Ten o'clock, tell myself a story while the telly rattles on. I know I've told stories before you're probably bored hearing about it, but bear with me. It's important. Tell myself a story and things make sense again. It's maybe the oldest story there is and I have been avoiding it. It's about a king, who has a beautiful palace with many many servants. And his favourite is the best and brightest servant, who he's very fond of. But he's still a servant, this fella. And that annoys him, because what does this idiot, impotent king do that he couldn't do himself? So he starts a big fight, and the servants split right down the middle. Now, he loses, and he gets kicked out of the palace to a horrible, horrible slum but… But he makes the most of it. And he devotes the rest of eternity to pissing off that king. _Better to reign in hell_, he says, _than serve in heaven_. I swear, that's the last story I'll tell you, I'll stop now, but you had to know.

Eleven o'clock, go to bed, listen to everybody else go to bed. Wait for quiet. Ma's not asleep, she's tossing and turning, but there's nothing I can do about that. Get shoes. Get bag out of the wardrobe. Go back downstairs. This about five minutes ago, about quarter to.

Notice living room door is open. Unusual; a fireman she fancied once told Ma to shut all the doors at night to stop fire spreading. Look inside. See bright shiny giftbag catching the light on the hearth. Investigating, find brand new jacket. Nice jacket too. And a note that says, _I'll leave your room as you leave it_. Which is decent of her and clever of her to have put it together and…

Leave bag on the hearth rug. Go to wait for Conor.

Yeah, my bag's not with me. And I'm just waiting. Feeling sick to the pit of my stomach over what I'm about to do, feeling like a Class-A arsehole, but calmer than I have in days. I don't doubt it anymore. I hate that I have to do it, but I don't doubt it.

Couple of minutes shy of midnight, Conor comes out, practically dancing, probably already singing The Star-Spangled Banner in his head…

He looks me over and says, "Cheer up t'fuck!" Then, long seconds after looking, he actually sees and says, "You're travelling a bit light, there, Jim…"

My best mate, standing there. The one who knows where all the bodies are buried. No pun intended… Who knows me best and who has taken so much shite, and given it back, and always still been there. My best mate who postponed his own escape because of me. Standing there with his busted up hand and his rucksack like we're going on some toff-wanker gap year adventure holiday. Loving it, until just a couple of seconds ago. How am I even supposed to-?

"I only came to say goodbye."

He deflates and has nothing else but, "What?"

"I… I can't. I mean, I don't want to, anymore." Fuck, even _I_ want to kill me for saying all this. I have loads of reasons too, but I don't want to tell him. Everything I have to say would be an awful truth and he doesn't need to hear that. He can go and do this his own way and learn the truth himself and he doesn't have to suffer here and now because of me. So I try and get away with, "Go. Please, just… Just go. Stay in touch."

Just a very slight, angry edge. He's not going to swing at me again. The stupidest question he could ever possibly ask in all his life, totally baffled, totally wrong; "_Why_?"

Because nothing will change, not really. The accents and the time of day. The background. But all the thoughts in all the heads of all the scum in all the cities will always be the same. People are so easy, and they're everywhere. It's killing me where I stand; how can I go out and force myself to look for peace from it all when I know it'll never come?

Because there is no great land of opportunity, America or otherwise. Opportunity is just waiting for the world to falter, for a crack to show, and shoving a fucking crowbar deep and never letting go of it until it lets you in. Opportunity is not something you can go to, it is something you _take_. Opportunity is a cold, irritating gun floating about your face. Happiness is a warm one, like the man said. Neither opportunity nor happiness is stood tapping its foot at JFK just waiting for Conor and me to land. There's nothing waiting for him, not in Belfast, not in London, not in New York City. There's a shite flat and a series of minimum wage jobs. What did we really think was going to happen to us?

Because leaving doesn't teach the bastards anything. Because if I run away this fucking hole has gotten away with it. Because it's better to reign in hell.

But I don't want to give Conor any of that weight to carry. So I steel myself, and get ready to do something only a little less terrible. I tell him, "That doesn't make any difference to you. I'm not going, that's all you need to know-"

"Jim, if this is a joke I'm not fecking laughing, mate." He looks round towards my back, like my bag might be hid behind the wheelie bins. I just let him look. He says, "It's not a joke?" I shake my head. "You're a prick. Why would you do this? And why would you wait until _now_?" This is all okay. I can take this. He's only saying this because he thinks this has all happened really quickly. He thinks I've made this decision since he jumped me putting the bins out. I'd be pissed off too. "Jesus fucking Christ, if you think I'm getting stuck here just because you've lost your bottle-"

That gets through. Hard to stay calm in the face of that. "_Lost_?" I say. For maybe the first time it's totally clear to me just how different we are as people. "Lost? No. No, _found_, you mean."

Waving one hand, starting to walk away, "Whatever you have to tell yourself. Fucking prick. Fucking bastard…"

"You're going to end up back here-" Me and this mouth of mine, he was walking away, that's what I wanted, I should have let him go, I can't believe I'm saying- "You'll end up back here and still be out here in the arse of nowhere and still be nobody and they'll laugh at you for trying."

Don't go. There's nothing in it for you.

He doesn't stop walking. He turns to face me but keeps going, step by totally determined step. It's dark and he's his back to the streetlights, so I can't see his face, but he hates me. Completely hates me. "I'll have _tried_," he spits, like I'm no more than shite.

I tell him, "I don't need to."

I hope to Christ I'm wrong. I hope he's in America for Christmas, and America opens its arms and gives him everything and the next I even hear of him he's calling me a wanker in a drunken speech as somebody gives him an award for whatever he decides to turn his hand to. I swear, if I ever pray for anything it'll be for that. I pray he walks over that golden bridge and under them golden arches and the streets are paved with gold for him and the whole thing is just like El Dorado all over. To God and Buddha and Shiva and anybody else who might be passing by, go with Conor and make the way smooth for him and give him everything he could ever want.

It's not very much to ask. Most people want so little. I don't see the point in that. If you're going to have ambitions, don't put such tiny little limits on them. God and Buddha and Shiva and all can go with Conor because I won't be wanting them again.

I'm sorry to send him away hating me, and not even understanding. But at least he's gone to try, yeah? Please, somebody tell me I'm doing the right thing by him here, because I don't trust myself.

I stand in the gate of the entry and watch him go. He doesn't look back. I think he knows I'm still here and maybe that's why. And then he turns the corner past the pub and…

Well, no 'and'. No nothing, after that.

After that I turn and go back to my own house. I get my bag, pretending to have never seen the present on the hearth or the note that goes with it. I spend the early hours of the morning unpacking again. But I like how tidy everything looks, how purged and clean, so I leave that other stuff in the boxes.

There's no point trying to sleep. In the morning I pretend to get up, like nothing ever happened. Ma is shocked at first, and then suspicious. Then she tries desperately to get that note out of the gift bag without me noticing. Nice of her. Then we all have breakfast, and there's bacon because it's a birthday, and Mena rips the piss out of me during the whole thing. Then I get dressed like I'm going to school, and pretend to go. But it's a different bus I get on, with the fiver I got off the auld lad in the door of the pub on Sunday. Driver gets all huffy about having to give out so much change, but I can listen to him this morning.

On the bus I get out of enough of my uniform to pass for anybody else on the street. At the river, I climb down and stand for a while at the rail, watching the swans slide by. Vicious bastards... They always look so frigging calm about it, though.

See, the trick isn't to run away from whatever dive you're born to. No, the trick is to turn your head to the side and look at it differently. Instead of saying to yourself, 'My prison', just say 'My kingdom' instead. A little change of perspective and everything changes.

Just say _Mine_.

It's a bright morning with a low, bloody sun. I watch it turn the river pink and red for a while. I let it push last night away from me. And then, feeling as close to better as I've any right to feel, I turn around and make for Callahan's office.

There's a reason for this. It's not that I like him, or that he seems to find me so useful. Like or loathe doesn't even come into it. There's a reason and you should know and I'm not spelling it out if you don't.

I think they've only just arrived; Bernie hasn't taken his usual place at the door. They're just inside, talking about something, with smiles on their faces. Callahan doesn't look all that surprised to be seeing me again. Happy about it, but not surprised. I take his money, untouched, out of my schoolbag and throw it to him.

"Give it back to me," I say, "when I'm worth it."

He doesn't miss a beat. Grins and tosses it right back; "Get yourself a decent suit," he says. "And we'll move you out of the sticks soon as possible. Happy birthday, son."

* * *

[A/N - as ever massive thanks to all who have read and supported. And, as ever, any crit or comments are very very welcome - if you don't tell me what you liked and didn't I can't keep doing my best to please. Much love, Sal.]


End file.
